The Last Time and the First Time
by Satinette
Summary: Mel’s last time with Vic and her first time with Cole, set between “What Lies Beneath” and “Remember When”. A somewhat different take on Mel and her favorite Cirronian than you’re likely used to reading.
1. Default Chapter

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The Last Time and the First Time   
by Satinette

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Mel's last time with Vic and her first time with Cole, set between "What Lies Beneath" and "Remember When". A somewhat different take on Mel and her favorite Cirronian than you're likely used to reading. Written both in answer to a Valentine's Day challenge and because these plot lines should eventually be addressed by anyone writing Tracker fiction. Believe the rating. Mostly minor spoilers for most of the season's episodes plus some references to my previous fic, "She Looks At Me Like Food". 

Author's Note: Introductory threads to new and rather different Mel and Cole historys and backstorys will be amplified and woven into future fictions.   
Stay tuned.

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I. THAT DAY: MEL

After kissing Vic a rather awkward good-morning-and-goodbye-and-good-luck-nailing-the-bad-guys, Mel exhaustedly drowsed in bed. It was nice to have some time before she had to go downstairs and begin her own workday. Vic was unquestionably the best lover she had ever had. Not that she'd really had all that _many._ If she wanted to be completely honest about the matter, he was even better than her beloved Rod had been, and last night he had more than surpassed himself. She'd had five spectacular orgasms, had even blacked out once but, as always, she still felt vaguely, undefinably, achingly frustrated, felt as though something inexpressible, something very vital, had been missing, felt she needed something more. By their own volition her hands began to trail over her still tender nipples, one stroking down her stomach and into the soft triangle of strawberry-blonde curls between her legs where it was still warm and moist from her incomplete fulfillment. 

Half asleep, she slipped a forefinger into the soft folds, seeking that small bundle of exquisitely sensitive nerve endings that so many men couldn't locate with a road map and so few knew how to properly stimulate even if they did somehow manage to find it. Not that any _real_ man would ever admit these things or allow himself to suffer the humiliating indignity of being given guidance. Those were the guys who would strut like peacocks if they happened to do it for you, but accused you of being frigid it you didn't get off. Fortunately, Vic wasn't among those stupidly misguided machos. His very first relationship had been of the Mrs. Robinson variety and, whoever that dear lady had been, she'd made very sure the young Victor Raymond Bruno learned _exactly_ where and how. Perhaps that was one of the major reasons why she'd so far succumbed to the two of them getting back together three times already. 

But great sex alone wasn't what she needed. She knew that last night would have to be their last time together as a couple, even if he didn't know it yet. She just hoped she could salvage the friendship. _Damn him!_ Why did he have to go _ruin_ it all like that? 

Willing all those thoughts and their considerable baggage away before she began to wallow in self pity and cry, Mel sighed and closed her eyes, touching herself with a gently teasing circular motion and giving her imagination free rein. She visualized soft lips hungrily speaking her name as they caressed the column of her throat, a hard, muscular body gliding over hers as she tightly clung to the broad shoulders, strong hands firmly cupping her buttocks to hold her at his merciless mercy, a fully engorged penis thrusting deep inside of her in undulating rhythm, in and out, harder and harder, over and over again... Her nipples began to tighten almost painfully and she massaged faster, her back arching, her breath quickening to ragged gasps. She was so close ... so ... very ... very ... close ... 

"Miss Porter? Are you awake yet? It's nearly a quarter to ten!" Pat's cheery Irish lilt reverberated through the apartment from the bottom of the stairwell. Pat was her temporary day manager and very much a happy-ray-of-sunshine-type of morning person. Mel was not a morning person. She found it irritating to be around morning people. 

With a low growl Mel rolled onto her belly, almost screaming her frustration into the pillows. "Um ... I'll be down in fifteen or twenty, Pat," she called out in a nearly normal voice. "I overslept and I'm about to take a quick shower. Be a love and put up a fresh pot, please?"

"Already perking! And there's no big rush. I've been here since nine and most everything's taken care of. Just have a lot of deliveries coming in this morn, you know? Including all those recovered sofa-chairs. Sure would be nice to have some brawn to lend us a hand. Is Mr Hauser back yet?"

"No, not yet," Mel answered with a faint smile, belting her robe and then stifling a yawn, the legacy of a night of sexual frenzy and little sleep. Now Cole, on the other hand, was a morning, noon _and_ night person. He didn't sleep at all. "I don't expect him before late tonight. More likely not until sometime tomorrow." This time they'd have to manage without the aid of Cole's admittedly impressive brawn'. 

Border-line depressed and yet hyper from all that had transpired between her and Vic the night before, Mel made it downstairs within eighteen minutes and found herself bustling around all morning. Which was exactly the way she wanted it. Her fatigue and constant forced, hectic activity saved her from having to think. Once the Watchfire's morning deliveries had been checked, inventoried and stored away, the day's specials agreed upon, the surprise visit by the City's Health Inspector handled, the newly recovered furniture set up, assorted supplier and distributor reps met with or talked with over the phone, and Lela, the cook, and the three part-time barmaid/waitresses, Sharon, Aline and Doreen, had set to work, the lunch crowd was getting heavy. It looked like it was going to be another very good day.

Satisfied that all was well under control and would continue to run smoothly without her, Mel decided it was time she cleaned house, a mindless activity if ever there was one. She spent most of the afternoon stripping her bed, doing laundry, and dusting and polishing all the wood and glass surfaces in her home, leaving the air pleasantly redolent with the twin scents of lemon and pine. She was just finishing up with a thorough and long overdue sweeping, sponge mopping and vacuuming of all the rugs and floors and found the only room left for her to tackle was the War Room. 

Bracing herself for the confrontation with Cole's organized chaos, Mel opened the door and surveyed the battlefield. All in all, not too bad, she thought, not bad at all. In fact, she hadn't seen this room looking so good since before he'd moved in. Either she had finally shamed him with her not so subtle hints or things had reached the point where even Cole hadn't been able to keep track of all the myriad bits and pieces of electronic, mechanical and computer clutter – _plus_ his other stuff. She noted that he'd recently even gone so far as to purchase an assortment of storage racks and boxes, these last all neatly labeled with Cirronian glyphs and stacked up on the shelving. As Cole regarded dust as being any machine's mortal enemy, at best interfering with its optimal efficiency – and as she had no intentions of even touching the several projects he was currently working on spread out on nearly every available surface – there was actually very little to be done. Perhaps he was becoming domesticated after all.

Or perhaps not. Scooping up the discarded socks, briefs, towels, jeans and sweats piled in a far corner on the floor, plus the four shirts he'd left hanging on the closet doorknob, she dumped those items in the bathroom's hamper, then busied herself with polishing the glass of the room's few pictures. That left only the floor to do. And maybe another load or two of laundry after that. 

Humming to herself to fill both her mind and the quiet, Mel began sweeping the broom around, making a special effort to get it as far beneath the free-standing tables, carts and shelving as she could. Like magic, all sorts of things began to appear along with the expected debris of floor dirt and discarded lengths of wiring: long lost rubber bands and paper clips, lots of loose change as well as fourteen dollars in paper currency, a Chicago street map, a bus schedule, a test tube with some unidentifiable dried crud stuck in the bottom of it, the missing set of special mini electronics tools that Cole had virtually torn the place apart searching for, a very overdue library book on human evolution, the Apache headband Wahote had given him and Cole had despaired of as lost, some torn-out newspaper clippings, numerous sheets of both used and pristine printer paper, an orphan sock ... 

Her humming now replaced with grumblings along the lines of how typical maleness probably transcends species lines throughout the entire known universe if not beyond, Mel got down on her hands and knees so that she could extend the broom clear back to the baseboards. _Ah ha!_ A coffee-stained spoon, a fossilized pizza crust, an outdated train schedule, dozens of _X-Acto_ blades, an empty fek-maln dropper-pen, an unpaid parking ticket, Cole's ID wristband from when he was in the mental hospital, a tourist map of the Roswell crash site, nearly a dozen blank recordable CDs, a wide assortment of screws, nuts, washers, clips and bolts, a half-eaten chocolate chip cookie ... 

And moving right along around the room ... a bus transfer, both his first and second cell phones, more rubber bands, paper clips and pocket change, three _Scrabble_ tiles, a fifty-dollar bill (!), a lone size-twelve _Nike_ running shoe, a still-wrapped _Hershey's Kiss_, an assortment of pens, pencils and markers, a crushed half-gallon milk carton, one of _her_ missing stud earrings _(yesss!),_ a travel brochure to Bora Bora, two unlabeled VHS video cassettes, the libretto from the opera she'd dragged him to see and he complained was too loud, and three paperback books: Stephen King's _"Misery", The New Merriam-Webster Dictionary,_ and ...

Mel blinked in shocked surprise, unaware that she'd uttered aloud a common swear word that she usually rigorously banned from her spoken vocabulary. She was looking at a very broken-in copy of Doctor Janet Sullivan's _"Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex"._ The author was one of the couple's therapists who had guided the Marital Bliss Seminars she and Cole had attended undercover to Track a particularly vicious pair of Orsian fugitives.

That Seminar had been a very major turning point in her life, changing everything, turning her entire world upside down. There was where she'd finally faced up to all that Cole had come to mean to her. There was where Cole had very nearly died, his lifeforce all but drained away to nothing. And an essential part of herself, one she'd never even realized had been missing before, had been forced to die a still-born's death shortly thereafter. Neither she nor they had been quite the same ever since.

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"Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex".

Why would he even have such a book? Was it simply a matter of idle curiosity? 

Ever since the day he'd shown her his Cirronian form – at her request – and especially ever since he'd described to her the intensely emotional spirituality of a Cirronian joining, she'd forced herself to come to terms with the idea that having a physical relationship with a human female might be about appealing to Cole as having one with a pet Collie would be to her. No matter how deeply loved the Collie. After all, he'd had many opportunities. She'd seen him hit upon numerous times, sometimes quite blatantly, but never once had she ever seen him show the slightest sexual interest for any woman, not even for herself. She supposed that, while he might seem to be an extremely desirable human male to any human female with a normal red cell count, no human female could even begin to provide him with so much as the _illusion_ of being a desirable Cirronian female! Their two species were just too different.

Moreover, his species was ancient. He'd told her that they were the oldest sentient form of life still extant in this galaxy. Cirronians had already outlived the star they'd initially evolved under and had spread out to colonize their neighboring solar systems long before the dinosaurs walked the Earth, long before the ancestors of the human species even evolved. Cole had even told her that humans and their physiology were quite primitive. Although he'd certainly never said so, she wouldn't be at all surprised if he viewed humans much as humans viewed gorillas and chimpanzees. He'd even recently said that _"Being human sucks"._ All in all, she'd been forced to conclude that, just because the corporeal human form he'd created seemed to be susceptible to sexual stimulation and capable of response, it didn't mean that the soul within was equally keen for it. 

And she'd never kidded herself that Cole was a complete innocent' in any true sense of the word. Regardless of how naive he sometimes seemed, and despite his relative infancy as a human, he was actually a grown man. Well, an adult Cirronian male, anyway. He'd once had a beloved mate and child. He had traveled to many worlds and was familiar with hundreds of extra-terrestrial species, likely learning at least something about their male/female relationships, if only by observation. Since he was exposed to human sexuality in some form or another nearly every day here on Earth, he'd certainly had the time to absorb the basics. It would be beyond belief, for example, to assume that he'd never explored some of the mysteries of his own new body, if only out of curiosity. _Everybody _masturbated at least occasionally, even very young children. She knew he'd seen hundreds of TV shows with more or less sexual themes – the antics on the_ Jerry Springer Show_ seemed to mesmerize him – as well as enjoyed seeing numerous movies, including a good number of the better R-rated ones. He had full access to the Internet, including any and all of its sexually-based websites, if he cared to peruse them. While helping him Track a Nodulian in the body of a 15-year old boy, out of the corner of her eye she saw him cop a girlie magazine and slip it beneath his jacket. He read novels, some containing sexual material. He read the newspaper and saw the news. He'd seen couples making-out in the parks and snuggling together at the tables at the Watchfire. He'd been the recipient of a lap dance (he claimed to have enjoyed it and had suggested she try it). In fact, the bar's own miniscule dance floor had, on several occasions, been the stage for hot and steamy _Dirty Dancing_-style dancing. He'd even been rather comically (in retrospect) almost molested by a Tiffany. And he was a far cry from being stupid. He'd known damn well what was going on when Tev tried to rape and infect her. She was quite certain he had a very good and reasonably accurate idea of the goings-on in a human bedroom.

Perhaps his body's responses and his undeniable affection for her were enough for him to initially consider the notion of a physical relationship, but then maybe that one real kiss they'd ever shared, the one that had so utterly and completely blown her away, had exactly the opposite effect on him. Certainly he soon thereafter rejected the idea of the two of them becoming physical. Although he'd been very gentle about it, letting her down as nice and easy as a pro (if she wanted to get cynical about it), he'd made it clear: he couldn't afford to be distracted' again. He'd used his nearly getting killed as his excuse. Although she knew that desire is always a very major distraction' whether it's acted upon or not – especially when two people live and work together twenty-four/seven – she hadn't dared challenge his decision as being absurd, just tried to accept it at face value and went meekly along with it. 

Her only other option would've been to translate it as: _Sorry, Mel. I like you, and I thought at first I might be interested, but I've found that isn't the case.'_

Had she chosen to wallow in an angsty _"Now, Voyager"_ fantasy of the two of them wanting each other over the risk of facing the possibility of him not desiring her as anything other than a friend, someone he could sometimes stroke and cuddle with like a favorite pet cat? Had she been afraid of discovering that he might not share her feelings in the same way or to the same degree or even at all and so had just let it ride? Or was she afraid that he, for whatever reason, had decided that he didn't want to pursue it? Or her? Is _that_ what she had really done to herself? 

And if she were going to chastise herself that far, then why not go for all the rest? Why had she permitted any of it to happen at all? Why couldn't she just have fallen for one of those very nice but average guys who frequented her bar, or who sat down next to her in the library's reading room, or who chatted with her on the teller's line at the bank or over the gas pumps on the self-service island, or who asked for her help in determining the ripeness of a melon in the supermarket's produce section? For that matter, why had she ever picked Cole up in the first place? What had ever possessed her to give him a home like adopting a stray kitten instead of calling Social Services as she'd originally intended? Why couldn't she have left well enough alone and spent the rest of her life in blissful ignorance?

She'd never allowed any man to get as deeply embedded in her soul as she'd let this Cirronian. Not even Rod. And certainly not Vic. Ever since her early twenties, after that disastrous, crushing affair with Bobby, she tried to keep every man she involved herself with at some sort of safe, arms-length emotional distance, so she wouldn't end up getting too hurt, so she could assure her own survival, so she could always feel that she was maintaining at least a modicum of control over the situation. But having an alien move in with her had been so intriguing, so bizarre, so surreal – and yes, so _exciting,_ such an escapist upper after the anguish of losing her grandmother and suddenly finding herself the new owner of the long-struggling bar – that she'd simply never bothered to erect her hard-learned psychological barriers to keep him out, never for a moment thought those barriers were even necessary. 

Why should she think she'd even _need_ them when she was renting_ Sesame Street_ and _Barney_ video learning tapes for him, for pity sake! (Although even the gentle Cirronian couldn't tolerate _Barney_ for more than five minutes). She'd risen to the daunting challenge of giving him a crash-course in humanity by taking him under her wing, patiently educating him in the English alphabet, the uses for and names of objects, grammar, pronunciation, sentence structure, verb tenses, numbers. She'd dragged him off for tours of the city, taken him to the zoo, the natural history museum, the aquarium, the historical society, various art museums, the mall. She'd outlined history and geography for him, explained human political, religious, philosophical and economic systems and beliefs as best she could, taught him how to write. Never before had she checked so many books on so many different things out of the library. They spent countless hours huddled together in his room, even further pursuing these myriad subjects over the Internet. Although he was soon reading well beyond Dr. Seuss, for quite some time his favorite book remained _"Green Eggs and Ham"._ And he'd learned everything she could think of to throw at him with staggering rapidity, absorbing it all like thirsty desert sands soaking up water, seldom having to be reminded of the same thing twice and rarely forgetting anything. 

Through it all, by blindly thinking of Cole as an alien, another species entirely only wearing a human suit, and not even considering the ramifications of the fact that, by human standards, that suit was devastatingly gorgeous and the rest of him was quickly becoming as human as anyone else in all the ways that really counted, she'd allowed him to become an integral part of herself before even realizing when or how it had happened. It was completely obvious to everyone – Jess, Jonas, her friends, Vic, the Watchfire's regulars, and even that creep Nestov – that Cole had become so much more than just a friend' to her long before she herself was willing to acknowledge or accept it.

And before she could even begin to adjust to what her heart had been trying so hard to tell her, before she could even begin to recover from the sudden ending of their brief but cautious courtship, while she was still struggling to deal with her feelings for him as likely always and forever never going beyond platonic friendship, her upside down world had turned utterly inside out. She'd learned that she herself wasn't entirely human. She was, in fact, part Cirronian; a part of her was exactly what Cole was. But she wasn't completely certain she knew quite what that was. Or what it meant. 

All she did know for sure was that, when Cole's job on Earth was done, when the last of the fugitives were finally caught, when he would pack it all up and return to his home planet some 100 light years away, dispense with his undercover human masquerade and resume being Daggon, he'd be taking with him the heart, the soul, the very essence of everything she was, of all she could ever hope to be. 

And he would never even know it. 

It would be unlikely that their paths would ever cross again. 

And she would never find another even remotely like him to share her life. 

She'd never wanted any of this to happen. She'd never dreamed that it would. But it had ... And everything about it, about her life, about herself, about Cole, about what they maybe were or maybe weren't to each other, about her future, about her world, terrified her to near total immobility.


	2. The Night Before: Mel and Vic

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II. THE NIGHT BEFORE: MEL AND VIC

Once upon a time, about a third of all the dates Mel ever had with Vic were cancelled at the last minute due to a case he was working on. Another third of their dates ended soon after they began because he got a call he couldn't (or wouldn't) ignore or put off. But now Vic was routinely leaving his cell phone and pager home whenever they spent time together, refusing to be on twenty-four hour cop call, so he could devote all his attention to her. Although she knew it would never last, it made Mel feel very special and gave their long-time on-again/off-again (but mostly off-again) romance yet another chance to reflower. 

Their evening together had been wonderful, a well-done dinner/theater showing of one of Mel's all-time favorite musicals, _"Cats",_ followed by several romantic hours of ballroom dancing to a live band at one of the city's more sophisticated, upscale clubs. It wasn't until later, when they'd retired to the living room of her apartment above the Watchfire over steamy cups of French Vanilla desert coffee and a late night assortment of pastries, that Mel realized how antsy Vic was becoming. 

They'd been chatting comfortably together all night but now Vic didn't seem to have anything to add to the conversation no matter what the subject. He also couldn't seem to remain seated for more than a few minutes at a time before jumping up, pacing around, then sitting down again. He pulled off and pocketed his tie, he unbuttoned the two top buttons of his shirt and obsessively fiddled with them, he repeatedly mussed up his hair and then tried to pat it back into place, he tapped first one foot and then the other, and he relentlessly began drumming his fingers on the back of the sofa. Finally, Mel had enough of his antics.

"What's with the jack-in-the-box routine, Vic? What's up?"

"Up? Nothing."

"Okay." Mel sipped her coffee and nibbled on her raspberry-chocolate croissant, waiting patiently. There had to be some reason why he was suddenly behaving as if he had just broken out in a rash, and she knew he'd get to it in his own time.

"I _said_ nothing'!"

"I know you did. And I said okay'. Is that a problem?"

"No. Not a problem. Er ... By the way, where's Cole been? Haven't seen him around lately."

"Europe. A business trip. Great Britain, France, Germany. The Netherlands, too, I think. Why?"

"Oh." Vic started cracking his knuckles.

"_Stop that!_ That's worse than listening to a cat retch up a hairball!"

"There's something strange about that guy, like he's really from another planet or something ... Can't seem to put my finger on it but ..."

"Vic ..."

"Well, what has he got to be living with you for? I don't understand why he ..."

"Oh, _please,_ Vic, do me a favor and give it a rest! I really don't want to hear all this yet again!" Mel tried to cut short his by now tediously familiar rants and pointed grillings over her boarder/handyman' before he got going. "How many times do I have to repeat myself? Cole and I are _friends."_

"Yeah, I _know!_ We were once _just _friends', too!"

"You're working yourself up into another insanely jealous snit over nothing. Cole and I are just friends who happen to share a domicile. There's _nothing _more than that between us."

"Jealous? _Me?_ Jealous? You think I'm _jealous?" _ Vic seemed to be stuck on that word. "What reason could I _possibly_ have to be _jealous_ of someone like Cole?" 

Mel wasn't sure if Vic was teasing or not any more. "Well, for starters," she began, ticking off the reasons on her fingers, "Because I see a good deal more of him than I do of you. Because he's probably the handsomest man anybody's ever seen. Because he lives with me," she deliberately left out the words: _and you do not'._ "Because he ..."

"Don't you mean that you think him the handsomest man _you've_ ever seen? If you think that way about him, then just maybe I _do_ have good cause to be jealous!"

"Of _course._ Like you've never platonically shared an apartment with a beautiful woman, hmmm? What about that cute, curvy redhead? Susan whatwashername? The two of you lived together for nearly two years, just sharing living expenses. Or so you've always said."

"That was different!" he protested.

"Really?" she challenged, knowing she had him cold. "Mind telling me just how?"

Vic abruptly dropped the subject and reached over to take her hand. "Mel, look. I've been doing a lot of serious thinking lately. It's just that ever since I was nearly killed in that attempted robbery at the Art Museum I've finally managed to get my priorities straight. I want to make sure you'll always be an important part of my life, that we'll always be together. I meant it when I said it then and I still mean it... I love you, Mel. Very much so. I have since the beginning." 

Vic's short speech and heartfelt declaration seemed to take all the wind out of his sails and he shyly lowered his head for a few moments to cover his embarrassment before looking up again. His lips twitched, then nervously pressed together as he reached into his jacket pocket to pull out a small, dark blue velvet jeweler's box and place it on the coffee table in front of her. Pasted on top of it was a single romantically hokey _pink SweetTart Valentine Candy_ marked with the words _Be Mine'._

Mel was struck dumb. She stared wide-eyed at the box, then at Vic, who met her eyes with a hopeful, pleading look. "I promise you, sweetheart. That isn't another .38 caliber slug. And I sure as hell didn't buy it online. Go on. Open it." 

With hesitant, trembling hands Mel picked up the box and opened the lid, revealing a not at all modest and very beautifully cut blue-white solitaire engagement diamond twinkling at her in the lamplight. Knowing Vic, his sister Anna had likely helped him pick it out and it was probably a flawless stone. There was no doubt in her mind that he'd gone deeply into debt to purchase it.

Vic dropped to one knee beside her. "Please, Mel. Will you marry me?"

"Um, Vic, I ... um," she stammered. "I I really don't know what to say." 

"I think yes' would be the _perfect _answer," he said, trying to project a little encouraging humor.

Telling Vic that she couldn't marry him had been one of the hardest things Mel had ever done in her life. The fact that he simply refused to believe she was actually turning him down only made it worse, and the argument-that-wasn't-quite-an-argument dragged on into the wee hours, wearing her out. Some rational part of her mind found it had to agree with Vic, that this proposal was the obvious direction her relationship with him should go, that she couldn't wait for the alien Tracker to finish his job and hope there'd then be more of a relationship waiting for her at the end. And if she wasn't going to wait for Cole then she couldn't forever sit on the fence, at one and the same time being afraid of the risks of commitment while simultaneously being afraid of loneliness, of always being alone. 

Yet in her heart, which Mel had always listened to first and foremost – all too often to her own despair – she knew she could not marry him. But she honestly didn't know whether to be sad or angry or frightened that she was making such a life-determining decision on the basis of nothing other than a neurotically ill-defined sense of wrongness that she once couldn't even articulate, the lifelong empty feeling of never really belonging. And now knowing why.

And then the argument-that-wasn't-quite-an-argument came around full circle.

"It's because you and Cole are sleeping together, isn't it?"

Vic's dogged directness was so annoyingly typical of him. Once he had a notion he was as unrelenting as a pitbull. Still, the angrily blurted bluntness of those words in the late night quiet of her living room weighed heavily upon her. Mel rose from the sofa and walked to the far side of the room, pulling the drapes aside and leaning her forehead against the cool window glass, gazing unseeingly across the street. "For the last time, Vic: No. Cole and I are not and never have been lovers."

Silence seemed to stretch long between them. Then Vic's voice, holding more than a trace of bitter sarcasm, "I do believe you sound very disappointed about that."

Wearily, Mel turned back to him. How was it possible, she wondered, to have known someone for so many years, to have become so intimate with their body, yet still remain so distant and disconnected from their soul? "And what if I am?" she questioned mildly, knowing it was the truth. More than that, knowing that _very disappointed'_ couldn't even begin to cover how she felt about it. Vic's eyes narrowed suspiciously and Mel just gave up. "Think whatever you want to, Vic. You will anyway. No matter what I say, no matter how I try to say it, you're pig-headedly determined to believe the opposite. And we're both very well aware of how much you hate to be wrong about anything."

With a quickness that startled her, Vic was suddenly directly in front of her, and she gasped in shock when his hands locked around her upper arms and hauled her hard up against him. "Here's something I haven't been wrong about yet," he growled, and claimed her mouth with his with punishing force.

Mel didn't bother offering even token resistance. The simple fact of the matter was she welcomed the hard surge of his body against hers. All the numbing major and minor fears, horrors, doubts, worries, angers, hurts, insecurities, sorrows, rejections, frustrations and feelings of utter helplessness and hopelessness she'd been steadily amassing in a strangling, tightly wound bundle since she'd encountered that ungainly, incoherent, near-naked and seemingly half-mad alien – and been drawn into the otherworldly horrors and nightmares of his life only to discover it was her life as well – served to hone her need for mindless release. And the adrenaline that fueled her unacknowledged rage at Cole and, most of all, at herself, at her life, at the out of control, incomprehensible world that was now her reality, was spilling well above the high water mark. She tunneled her fingers into Vic's hair and held him to her, returning as much ferocity as she was given. 

Throughout their flip-flopping friends/lovers relationship, she had never ceased to thrill to Vic's touch. And this time was no exception. She knew his sudden lust was little more than the primal male reaction to conquer, an angry response to her perceived actions, a balm for his hurt ego, an attempt to leave his mark on her and stamp her as his possession. But at that moment she wanted it. Not that she needed to feel that she was his reason for being, only that she desperately needed to free herself from the crushing weight of all her self-enforced inhibitions and _feel._

Never relinquishing her mouth, Vic picked her up in his arms and carried her to her bedroom, laying her on the bed and following her down. This was not gentle seduction or teasing foreplay. Mel's skirt was quickly bunched up around her hips as his hands slid possessively up to claim her thighs, shredding her thin silk panties away in one vicious motion. Vic dispatched with his slacks with the same efficiency and then, with only a moment's pause to grab a condom from the nightstand, he was upon her, greedily and rampantly pistoning into her. She cried out from the sheer the force of his entry, but within moments her body began to liquefy around him. She clung to him, twinning her legs around his waist, urging him on with a demanding, wordless challenge.

They'd bedded many times in the past and there were few facets of normal sexuality they hadn't explored together, but this was little more than consentual rape, a brutal rutting, each of them selfishly taking what they wanted and caring little if anything might be given back in return. Mel grappled with the wool worsted fabric of Vic's jacket, pulled at his shirt until the seams tore and the buttons popped, until his heated flesh was laid bare to her and she was free to sink her teeth into his shoulders and claw her nails across his chest and down the length of his back. The uncharacteristic wantonness of her savagery only served to amplify and spur his own. His hands roughly clutched, grasped and fondled her, tearing her blouse away, shoving her bra up around her neck to allow his mouth full access to her breasts, his punishing teeth eliciting groans and whimpers. They swiftly and almost simultaneously reached climax, the waves repeatedly crashing over them, both unwilling to swim back to the surface for air. Finally Vic collapsed on top of her. They lay in torn and tangled clothing, bathed in heated sweat and raw emotion. A degree of tenderness took root between them and grew to flowering as Mel stroked his hair. He nestled his head in the crook of her neck as their breathing returned to normal and both their bodies recovered. 

Vic raised his head and gazed at her and Mel read the anguished apology written there. She cupped his face in her hands in answer, drawing him down to her. They kissed again, this time sweetly. With infinite gentleness he held her, smoothing her riotously tangled curls away from her face, one finger softly tracing the outline of her mouth that was so bruised and swollen from his initial assault. "I really do love you, Mel," he whispered huskily, his voice full of hope and determination. "Whatever's wrong between us, whatever the problem may be, we can work it out. I know we can. We _belong_ together." 

Vic moved his weight off and lay down beside her. She turned onto her side and he enveloped her in his arms, spooning around her back, snugly fitting the contours of his body to hers. Mel felt herself slowly sinking into his embrace. His cheek pressed softly against hers, caressingly. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, feeling distanced from all her pains and sorrows, and allowed herself to fully relax into him. He felt the subtle yielding change and splayed his hand over her stomach, drawing her closer to him, pressing against her until there could be no question of his continued desires. 

Mel didn't attempt to resist or pull away. She honestly didn't want to. 

"Do I even have to tell you," Vic murmured, "how wonderful these last few weeks have been for me? Seeing you again, the two of us spending all this time as a couple again?" He stroked his hand through her tangled hair, trailing it up and down her arm before moving to cup her breast. _He has eyes only for me, she thought, I've known that for a long time now. _

"For me, too," Mel had to admit, but her own eyes glistened with unshed tears. She knew she was about to make a choice, a totally and completely selfish one, but the truth was that she didn't care. She'd been celibate for too long, had been yearning for too long, had put so many of her own wants, needs, hopes, dreams and desires on indefinite hold for far too long, and wanted for once to be selfish, wanted to indulge herself this one last night of utter, mindless abandon with a more than willing partner.

"Promise me you won't say no yet. Promise me it's a maybe. Promise me you'll at least think about it."

"Vic, you don't understand. I ... I ..."

"Promise me this, sweetheart. Please."

"Vic ..."

"Just think about it," he insisted, his breath hot and enticing against her ear, his fingers expertly teasing her nipple to arousal. "Think about it. Please, sweetheart? Please?"

Mel closed her eyes, taking a deep breath. Vic simply refused to listen. Yes, she did love him. They both knew she did. But was that enough? Did she love him enough to be his wife? Maybe if he'd asked her even a few months ago, asked her before ... _No!_ She couldn't allow her thoughts to stray anywhere near all that endless morass of pain. She was so confused, so exhausted from arguing with him. But if she didn't at least say what he wanted to hear, Vic would only become more insistent, more demanding. And he really was a terrific lover, especially once he really got warmed up. She turned in his arms and smiled, deliberately allowing her smile to reach her eyes and turn softly seductive. "Alright, Vic. I surrender. You win. A maybe' it is. I promise to at least think about it," she purred.

"Oh, Mel..." 

She shushed him and placed two fingers on his lips. "No more words, Vic. Just kiss me and for tonight, just for tonight, we'll let our bodies do all our talking." He was kissing her before she'd finished speaking, pulling her flush against him, the heat of his body sinking into her as he stroked his tongue deep into her mouth. Though welcome, she found it an oddly strange sensation, so very familiar yet somehow foreign. But however foreign, she thought, Vic was here for her. He was with her. He truly wanted her. And if she would allow it, if she _could _allow it, he wanted to give her all those wonderful happily-ever-after human fantasies she had all but abandoned and that had returned with a vengeance to bitterly haunt the lonely corridors of her neglected soul.


	3. The Rest of That Day: Mel

****

III. THE REST OF THAT DAY: MEL

The moment the phone rang, Mel dropped what she was doing and hurried to answer it. She hadn't heard from Cole in days, not since he'd taken the air shuttle from Heathrow to Orly, in fact, and the toll of not knowing if he was okay was preying on her more than usual. And it usually preyed on her a great deal. 

Mel knew there was always the possibility that one day Cole might not return from the mortal dangers he faced when in pursuit of a Collection. She lived with the constant unspoken anxiety of knowing that each time he walked out the door could well be the last time she'd ever see him. Although it was something that had been part of their relationship since the beginning, she sometimes obsessed about it to near madness. But this was the nature of his job and she had to allow him to focus, couldn't let him know the extreme depths her terrors sometimes plunged her into. She dutifully tried to keep her fears locked deep in her heart and away from her everyday being, tried to keep her mind busy with normalcy. The trouble was, by now it had become like living under heavy bombardment in a war zone and she didn't know how much longer she could endure the unrelenting stress. Nothing was normal' for her any more, she _knew_ Cole wasn't immortal, and she was reaching the end of her rope, thoroughly exhausted from the constant effort of putting on a brave front. 

But the call wasn't from Cole. It was Vic. _Again._ His second call of the day. 

Mel dangled the phone by its cord a distance away from her ear so that Vic could air his happy blatherings to the room at large and firmly pinched two fingers over the bridge of her nose, squeezing her eyes shut. A nasty, many-clawed demon of a tension headache was beginning to roil, simmering through her brain synapsis like a poisonous witch's brew. _Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble... _

The diamond was burning a hole in his pocket, Vic said. He wouldn't feel it was safe and secure until the ring was where it belonged: on her dainty finger. His mother was ecstatic that the last of her sons was finally _– finally! –_ getting married and wanted to throw a small engagement party just for the immediate family (the Brunos were an _enormous_ family!) and about two or three hundred of their very closest friends. His Grandma Sophia was in tears because Mel wasn't Italian, while his Grandma Maria kept yelling at Sophia that it didn't matter what she was so long as they could teach her to _cook _Italian. (Isn't that _cute_?) But they both agreed that the Watchfire would have to be sold. It just wasn't properly _respectable_ for the wife of a Bruno to be the proprietor a _bar._ His younger sister Rose wanted to take her shopping to pick out her wedding dress, while his older sister Anna felt that was tacky, that she should have the dress custom made and knew just the seamstress to do it. Quite reasonably, too. And what about the church? His Uncle Vito – the one from his _father's_ side of the family – had submitted a list of more than a dozen dates during the next eight months of when his catering hall wasn't booked and wanted to know which date they wanted. Would it be okay if his 4-year old niece was the flower girl? She really was _so_ adorable! His other Uncle Vito – the one from his _mother's_ side of the family – was in real estate and would help them find a home. Did she have any particular preference as to neighborhoods? Three of his cousins, all in the travel business and none on speaking terms with any of the others, had declared war as to which one of them would be booking the honeymoon arrangements. What did she think about a two-week Caribbean cruise? Hawaii? Maybe Paris? And Vic's mother wanted to know what her color scheme was to be because she _dearly_ wanted to help pick out the stationery for the invitations. After all, poor little Mel didn't have her mother or grandmother or any family left to ...

"_Dammit,_ Vic!" Mel finally screamed into the phone. "I told you I would _think_ about it! That means I'm _considering_ it! It doesn't mean you'll have your answer in a few minutes or a few hours or the next day even in a few days!" Vic began making soothing noises "And _regardless_ of what anyone in your family may have told you, it _doesn't_ mean that I'm _only_ being coy _or_ playing hard to get!" Vic was giving her more soothing noises, which only made her scream louder "Didn't anyone ever teach you that maybe' might mean _just_ that? And how _dare_ you assume you know what my answer is going to be before _I've_ even had the chance to figure that out myself, much less get the chance to tell you!?!" 

Now, of course, Vic wanted to come over, wanted to talk with her, wanted to have dinner with her. Mel flat out told him no and said that she was very tired and would be going to bed early, which he thought was a _wonderful_ idea. Very testily, and enunciating very clearly, Mel made it plain that she'd give him her answer in a day or so but she didn't wish to either see him _or_ speak with him until then and that _she_ would be calling _him._ Then she slammed down the phone before he could say another word.

__

God! No matter the species, the males are an entirely different species! 

Mel could not believe that she'd actually spent more than three-and-a-half seconds of her life seriously toying with the idea that maybe she should marry Vic. It would never work. It would be a disaster. Vic was a third-generation Chicago cop. Both his grandfathers had been cops; his father and one of his father's brothers had been cops; three of his mother's brothers had been cops; his youngest brother was a cop; Anna was married to a cop. There were even more cops heavily sprinkled throughout the family tree, more than enough to staff an _entire squad!_ And _all_ of them _male!_ The entire family had a typically paternalistic cop mentality, the job always coming first, the wives seeing to the home and children, keeping themselves pretty like hot-house flowers, and living for the return of their blue warrior men, not really a part of their lives at all. And definitely not equals in any modern sense of the word. Mel simply couldn't picture herself fitting into the confines of such a role, that of a cherished and adored pet.

Vic was basically a good man, a decent man, a caring man – a real sweetie, in fact – but he was also a product of both the Old World values of his family and the Chicago PD and he could sometimes be cold or even dismissive. It had to be his way or the highway. And he could be a royal pain in the ass about it. He could also be oblivious to the needs and sensibilities of others if they happened to conflict with his own or with those of people he considers close to him. 

As he was and always had been oblivious to most of hers. 

With Vic, the job and his career would _always_ come first. Then his cop buddies and the union. Then sports. However beloved, no wife of his would ever be better than number five.

She loved Vic as a friend and (what would have to be past tense now) as an occasional lover. But he _didn't _love her. Not as she _needed_ a man to love her. He didn't even know who she really was, refused to even see it. He only loved his _idea_ of her, his _image_ of her, what he _wanted_ her to be _to_ him.

Mel breathed a slight sigh of relief. At least one of the decisions she had to make was now settled and her thoughts about it all straightened out. Now all she had to do was get Vic to accept it. It wouldn't be an easy thing to do, and it would have to be done in person, but right now an even harder and, to her mind, a much more important thing than Vic needed to be dealt with and confronted. 

Cole.

Funny how things often seem to come to a head together. Must be a type of domino effect', one tile inexorably leading to the knocking down of the next until they were all in a flattened heap.

Mel put the phone back on her nightstand, went to the bathroom to swallow two _Excedrin_ for her headache, squared her shoulders, and then marched herself back into the War Room.

Everything had already been swept up, the garbage dumped and all else put away in its appropriate place. All except Doctor Janet Sullivan's _"Love as_ _Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex"._ The book remained on the floor exactly as she'd first swept it out from under the shelving. She hadn't picked it up, hadn't even touched it. It's cover was semi-gloss black with embossed red lettering in an elegant flowing script. A color photo of the author was in the lower left. The title and the few lines of cover blurb promised a tasteful and sensitive approach to unlocking the erotic secrets of a woman's body, to understanding how a woman's body and emotions are often linked, and to learning how to stimulate and please both to communicate with her soul. 

The cover was scuffed, the spine broken, and several pages appeared to be torn and loose. But the book itself seemed more than just another tired paperback. It reminded her of a black widow spider. For all she knew, fangs were concealed in those pages in the form of underlining or in Cirronian glyphs scribbled into the margins. Or in something else entirely. Did she want to find out? Did she dare?

She'd never, ever had it this bad over any man before. And it had snuck up on her so gradually. Cole's very presence had now become a constantly felt physical pressure of awareness on her, his amazing hazel-brown eyes softly caressing, his oddly-accented baritone like a gentle stroking. Yet there were so many things she didn't know about him, many that instinct told her she would be best off not asking about and never knowing at all. And no matter the gorgeous human form he wore, Cole was an alien species, not of this world. Still, what they had shared – what her heart so hoped _was_ shared – in that one kiss at the Seminar had obliterated all the boundaries of them being two different species from two different worlds. At least for her it had. It had penetrated so deep to the very core of her, so deep into her soul, that it had ignited her entire essence and left her branded. The very idea of never being able to have more with him was as inconceivable to her as living the rest of her life without oxygen.

And it _wasn't_ just about lust. It was so much more than just that, exponentially intensifying what had already become an intense emotional attachment to him. Lust alone was something she knew very well. Lust was a glorious, animalistic hunger of raw physical need, the pleasurable frenzy of wet, hot bodies mindlessly joining in the primal drive for sexual satisfaction. Lust is what she had shared on occasion with Vic. It wasn't love.

Mel shuddered, her nipples becoming achingly taut, her skin rippling with gooseflesh, her body reacting to an all too vivid mental image of being locked in such an intimate embrace with Cole and both of them being able to fully express that degree of intense emotional attachment, letting her know in no uncertain terms the profound impact he'd come to have on her. 

Did he ever think of her in those terms, as she did of him? Is that why he had the book? Had that kiss they shared affected him the same way? Had he felt what she had? _Had he?_ Were all of her previous thoughts and conclusions on the matter incorrect? And if he had, and if they were, then why were they now the way they were? And what could she do about it?

She simply couldn't bring herself to reach down and actually pick the book up. 

The _Excedrin_ wasn't helping. She needed a drink. A big, stiff gin martini. A double. No, she didn't need a drink. She needed therapy. Very serious, very heavily medicated therapy. 

Turning on her heel, Mel again left Janet Sullivan's book right where it was and went downstairs, catching Pat before the end of her shift to ask her if she would please take the night shift as well, pleading a headache and exhaustion and explaining that she wanted to get to bed early. As Pat could well use the extra money for her daughter's tuition, she was more than agreeable and began fussing over her like a mother hen, insisting that the only sure cure for a headache is _food _(as her own well-padded backside could attest), preferably _pasta_ (this from an Irish woman) and _lots_ of it, followed by a sinfully healthy overdose of dark chocolate (which in and of itself can cure almost anything). 

The mention of the word food' was enough to bring the sharp-eared Lela bustling over from out of the kitchen to put in her two-cents worth. She clucked like the even bigger hen she was and pointed out that Mel was already too scrawny (in her estimation, anyone who weighed less than 200-pounds was too thin and probably malnourished as well – unless they happened to be less than five-feet tall) and _nobody_ should ever go to bed without a good, stick-to-the-ribs hearty dinner in them or they ran the _grave_ risk of dying in their sleep from starvation. 

Before she knew it, the outnumbered and outgunned Mel was being firmly hustled back upstairs by her two well-meaning employees, laden with two loaves of garlic bread, a big bowl of salad, a one pound bar of _Hershey's_ semi-sweet dark chocolate, and a huge deep-dish platter of Lela's outstanding lasagna to nuke up in her microwave for her dinner – "... with enough left over for your nice Mr Hauser when he gets home. A big man like him needs _lots_ of energy!" Then Lela winked at Pat and they both giggled, Pat slyly adding, "And you certainly _do_ want a man like that to have _lots and lots_ of energy, _don't _you?" Besides, both knew that Cole was simply wild about Lela's lasagna and, like Jess before them, they both well appreciated a man who could eat with such obvious gusto.

Mel was left mumbling to herself in her kitchen, coming to the conclusion that somewhere along the way her life had become an amalgam of a Marx Brothers movie, _the X-Files, Saturday Night Live_, the _Twilight Zone_ and _Third_ _Rock From the Sun_. With overtones from both versions of _Invasion of the_ _Body Snatchers._ Eat your heart out, Steven Spielberg.

Breaking off a square of chocolate to console herself with, Mel tried to get a grip. _Okay!_ She'd eat a nice quiet dinner, wash her hair, take a long and luxurious bubblebath, and then go to bed early. Somewhere in the middle of that utter normalcy she'd amble back into the War Room and simply put Sullivan's book up on his shelf with his other books and be done with it. Heck, she may as well do it right now. Breaking off a second square of chocolate for courage, Mel marched back into the War Room.

One of Cole's computers was in the middle of doing an automatic download of something from somewhere, some system or other he'd probably ... Oh, what the hell did _she_ know about any of it, anyway, beyond the fact that _Tracker'_ coincidentally rhymes with _hacker'?_ And Cole paid absolutely no attention to her repeated lecturings that he shouldn't be doing these things. (Alien cops, of course, have the right to completely ignore any and all human laws they choose to as long as they're the _good_ guys. Everybody _knows _that! _Especially_ alien cops!). She watched the frantic on-screen activity for a moment, Cirronian glyphs running up one side, English words down the other. Apparently, the security system knew the firewalls were being breached and was going nuts about it. Windows kept popping up, the word _downloading'_ kept flashing. She looked closer. _Oh, great!_ He's got automatic access to the highly classified top secret files of the Central Intelligence Agency, too_. Well, why not?_ He was also into the Chicago PD, the DMV, the FBI, NORAD, NAASA, British Intelligence, Interpol, the Mossad, the Pentagon and who knows what all! Even Bill Gates probably wasn't immune. There didn't seem to be any system anywhere that Cole couldn't hack into whenever he damn well pleased, for anything he damn well pleased. Good thing Cole was the good guy. Download complete, Cole's program went into it's final scramble' mode. By this point in time Mel knew enough to realize that, even if the CIA did try to trace that breach, it would likely lead them to a seven-year old's school laptop in Zanzibar or something. The screen abruptly went dark. Show over.

__

"Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex" was still there on the floor. Mel gingerly poked at it with the toe of her shoe. _Nice spider, good spider._ Damn! It's _only_ a book. Right. Like she's _only _human.

Before that Marital Bliss Seminar Cole was such a toucher. It had taken her a few weeks into their relationship, however, to realize that he was only a toucher with her, that most of the time he seemed, at best, to be uncomfortable with touching, or being touched, by anyone else. He'd eventually accepted Jess' exuberant attentions, albet reservedly, but still wasn't fully at ease with a simple gesture like shaking hands. From the very beginning, however, she could do most anything, grasp his wrist to direct his attention to something, take his arm and just lead him along like a well-trained dog placidly following at heel, and he never objected or attempted to pull away. She could even pull his shirt off as if he were her very own _Ken_ doll to correct his wearing of it if he'd put it on backwards or inside out. No matter _what_ she did – comb his hair or push it back off his forehead, put her arms around him from behind to show him how to properly floss and brush his teeth, give him a manicure, even bathe him, for pity sake! – he seemed to behave as if she had every right to do so. 

And then there was that damn Cirronian thing he did, that throat pet or stroke or caress or whatever it was. He'd first done it to her just a few minutes after they'd met, when she pulled the car over, determined not to drive all the way to Chicago with a nearly naked man sitting beside her. She'd gone into the car's trunk, taken out the never-worn pink sequined stretchy top her grandmother had given her for her twenty-first birthday and an old pair of her jogging sweatpants, and brought them around to the passenger side for him. When he didn't seem to know what to do with the offered garments, she became impatient and just pulled the top over his head. Cole nearly freaked at that, like a fish suddenly finding itself caught in a net, but froze stock still when she yelled _"Hey!",_ looking up at her uncertainly. Their gazes locked for a long moment, then he reached up and gave her throat a gentle, tentative stroke, absurdly reminding her of a nervous puppy offering a quick lick to seek reassurance. But amazingly, her impatience, as well as the somewhat-more-than-just-a-touch of fear she had of him, simply vanished. And he then quietly accepted her help in donning the clothes without any problems.

That throat stroke had evolved considerably over time, too. Once restricted to just the base of her throat and upper chest around her collarbone, it eventually encompassed the entire front of her neck from her chin down. And Cole seemed to do it for almost any reason at all – in greeting or acknowledgement, to seek or give assurance or reassurance, to indicate trust, for affection, to calm or soothe, to give thanks – and very often for no particular reason that she could discern. And he never (to her knowledge) stroked anyone else's throat. Moreover, the sensation of it went from initially feeling odd to feeling quite good, sometimes even almost erotic in a strange sort of way. By accident, she discovered that if she should happen to respond to it by touching his chest, especially over his heart, he'd always lean into her hand, apparently enjoying that particular touch from her immensely. Certainly Cole permitted no one else to touch him on the chest. No one. And she had to admit to a certain guilty pleasure in it as well because she could then savor his body's clean and unique spicy-musk scent and feel his body heat, a temperature so high that one would think he was very ill with fever except his warmth was entirely self-contained and didn't radiate, wasn't even noticeable, in fact, unless he was actually touched. 

It was all somehow very sweet and private, an intimacy just between them.

Now, however, there was very little of any of that between them any more. Too distracting'. (_Oh, no!_ Mustn't have any of _that!)_ Now they were both walking on eggshells around each other, oftentimes deliberately avoiding each other altogether, almost working up an unspoken schedule of when each would be either upstairs or down at the bar so that the other could mostly stay away. It wasn't so bad when they were in public together or when he needed her assistance for a Track but otherwise, most of the time when they were both alone together upstairs, Cole was in his War Room with _his_ door closed and she was in her bedroom with _her_ door closed. Each offered the other the occasional olive branch but, unless they were heavily into a Track together, they couldn't seem to really connect and _stay_ connected for more than a short period of time. They still had their sometime moments, to be sure, sometimes great and extensive moments, but they rarely even ate together anymore, even their regular late night after-hours snacks and Sunday morning brunches together much a thing of the past.

It had long since gone beyond the point of being ludicrous, except that the more they didn't see one another, the more distant they were with each other, the more nervous and uptight Mel become. She still badly wanted Cole to touch her, badly wanted to span the growing breach, but at the same time she didn't. And the internal conflict was tearing her apart. She was simply just getting too many mixed signals from him! How could she be both a distraction' _and_ his idea of home'? _What did he want of her?_ And as much as she valued his friendship, her feelings and her hormones were getting in the way and it had become just too frustrating, too ego-debilitating, too tense, too painful. Everything had begun to seem like an empty, meaningless promise with little, if any, hope of fulfillment. 

Cole just seemed to become more reclusive, even secretive. No distractions' that way, she guessed. Otherwise, she had no idea what he was thinking about all of it, or her, at all. If at all.

She had even been starting to think that she should just ask him to move out, find his own place to live, give them both some space. That way they wouldn't be on top of each other all the time and she could maybe then handle them being _just_ friends. And he wouldn't be bothered by distractions'. Nothing else between them would have to change. She'd _still_ help him, of course, but _strictly_ as his _friend,_ as she helped any friend, without him also being her underfoot live-in and constant source of desire just in the next room. Then in quick succession she discovers that her grandfather was a Cirronian, just like Cole, and she now has a very dangerous Vardian, one who'd killed her once before already (or nearly did), locked in an underground vault just beneath her. 

How could she possibly ask him to go now? She was too damn terrified to be without him!

__

"Love as Worship: A Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex". Why is a book like you even here? What do you have to do with Cole? With me? With us? _Black widow spider, if I reach down and pick you up, will you bite me? And if you do, will I survive it?_ She was losing it. No, it' was _already_ lost. Mel again poked at the book with the toe of her shoe. She had half a mind to kick the damn thing back into it's spidery hiding place under the shelving. Cole certainly wouldn't be any the wiser. 

But she would.

If only there was someone she could talk to openly and honestly about all this, someone she could unburden herself to, someone she could seek guidance from. But of course there wasn't. There was only Cole. And _he_ was her problem! _Hey, gang! Guess what? I've fallen madly, passionately, head over heels hopelessly in love with this alien Tracker from the planet Cirron, see ..._ They'd sic the white-coated little men with the big nets on her for sure if she tried to explain. This was nothing short of total and complete emotional and psychological isolation, more so than she'd ever known before. Mel knew that she'd always been more than just a somewhat uptight person. Hell, she bordered on anal retentive, if she wanted to be honest with herself about it. But now, with no true outlets for this with anyone, with having to remain always on her guard, always secretive about so much that she knew, always reserved and restrained about so much that she felt, she'd become what she could only describe as grossly inhibited. And she _hated_ herself for becoming like this, for being like this. 

Before she met Cole, Mel had thought that she was finally on the road to personal salvation and fulfillment, had thought she'd finally turned a major corner in her life by ceasing her self-sacrifices for the sake of men, concentrating instead only on herself. She had tried to drastically simplify her life, removing any and all of the endless series of complications her life had, starting with every relationship she was in that wasn't going as she wanted it to, even if it meant being alone. Vic could testify to that. _Oh, boy!_ Now she found herself floundering without a compass in the most complicated, most complex relationship imaginable. With no satisfactory way in or out that she could see.

With tears rolling down her face, she left the War Room to nuke up her dinner, again leaving the book exactly where it was.

As she forced herself to eat, Mel found herself obsessing, again questioning her sanity or, at the very least, her basic intelligence. She repeatedly wondered whatever had ever possessed her to slip so easily into such a close relationship with a man she knew almost nothing about save that he truly seemed to be gentle, honest, caring, intelligent, kind, intuitive, quietly spiritual, often inadvertently funny, completely trustworthy – and was by far the most interesting and unusual man she'd ever met. 

Yet although Cole had been living with her for the better part of the year, Mel had to admit that she knew relatively little about him personally. She knew the broad outlines of his life, to be sure, but few of the little details most people usually provide over time to fully sketch out their backgrounds. He readily talked about his family (especially his daughter) and at least some of the aspects of his work, about worlds he'd been to, something about their historys, philosophys, natural historys, societies and cultures, but he offered very little concrete information about himself or even the society he came from, just a basic resume. While he never avoided answering any of her direct questions about these things, he usually answered only to the letter of her question, rarely offering to say much, if anything, beyond that. It was as if he really didn't want to talk about himself and his world at all. This oftentimes made her wonder if Cole was really everything he seemed to be, if there wasn't some sort of hidden identity to him concealed beneath numerous layers of camouflage. 

Certainly his thoughts usually shone bright and clear in those amazing eyes of his, but other times she had the distinct impression that what he was really thinking was kept well hidden, like treasure sunken beneath the waters of deep dark waves. While he was the most quietly humble man she'd ever known, there was also a fierce pride and confidence about him as well. He had enormous strength, but beneath that strength surged a molten core of vulnerability that could easily be touched. And while a raging storm of emotional pain seemed to be tightly contained within him, it churned all but unseen beneath an outward aspect of gentle serenity and acceptance. 

Mel wasn't even certain if Cole's human form was in any way an accurate indicator of old he was. Sometimes when she watched him, especially when he was deeply focused into his work and his naiveté as a human wasn't visible or even a factor, she thought she could detect an aura of age and experience shimmering about him that went so far beyond the some four to four-and-a-half decades he appeared to be it was almost frightening. More, she saw Cole as a man who often just seemed to know things, to keenly sense things, to be a man with secrets locked deep in his soul. And, on some fundamental level, no matter how innocent' he appeared, she paradoxically saw him as a man who had somewhere along the way forgotten innocence's true meaning, forgotten it a very long time ago. 

Mel knew that there had to be one or more explanations for all these oddities, but those that she could come up with just didn't seem to quite fit. They were like keys which will easily slide into a lock but can't open the door because, although all the mitered groves line up, the notches are slightly off. 

By the time she was finished with dinner, Mel's mind had gone numb. She was also more thoroughly exhausted, both physically and emotionally, than she could ever remember feeling. Half asleep, she cleaned up the dinner dishes, then washed her hair. Shortly thereafter, she nearly dozed off in the fragrant warmth of her bubblebath with a glass of wine. She was just toddling off to bed when she again remembered Dr Sullivan's _"Love as Worship: A_ _Man's Complete Guide to the Art and Soul of Sex"_ laying where she'd left it on the floor of Cole's room and hesitated in the doorway of her bedroom.

She closed her eyes a moment and with a deep breath she detoured, once again forcing herself to enter the War Room. The book was (obviously) still there, looking completely innocuous. After all, it was only a ratty paperback. _Sure it was._ Annoyed with herself, Mel finally picked it up_. There, now. That wasn't so hard._ She speculatively turned it over in her hands, then randomly began to thumb through it. 

True to its cover blurb, it was a detailed yet lyrically written and extremely tasteful sexual primer, one that would be quite suitable for a man (or even a woman) of any age or experience. Even the many graphic line art illustrations were beautifully and poetically handled. There was no underlining of passages as she'd imagined, no Cirronian glyphs. Although nothing about it told her why Cole had the book in the first place, she somehow felt better.

She was just about to place the book on the shelf along with Cole's other books when the broken spine automatically opened it to the title page. Dr Sullivan had signed this copy and had written a personal message:

__

"Dear Mr Hauser – This is only a basic driver's manual. Read it, study it, check out at least some of the equipment, then imagine yourself behind the wheel. But until you've actually driven, and allowed yourself to be driven, the two of you will never truly know the shared joys and wonders of the road. 

"I sincerely wish you and your lovely new wife every luck in the world. I've never known a couple more deeply in love than the two of you. Please listen to your heart, and hers, and may God bless you both. – Janet Sullivan."

The book dropped from Mel's suddenly nerveless fingers. With a straggled sob she kicked it under the shelving and fled the sufficating confines of Cole's War Room.


	4. Very Early Morning the Next Day: Cole

****

IV. VERY EARLY MORNING THE NEXT DAY: COLE

Nestov stuffed his wool-gloved hands deep into the warmth of his armpits, stomping his feet to hurry circulation. It wasn't really all that terribly cold, mainly chill-damp from the blustery winds off the Lake. Rather balmy weather for a Nodulian perhaps, but not for him. The thing of it was, he was overly tired and he had to remain stationary for too much of the time, so he was feeling the weather's affects more keenly than usual. And it was very late. Or very early, depending upon how one looked at it. 3:00 in the morning. The Tracker might not need to sleep, he ruefully thought, but he did. About three or four out of every twenty-four or so would do him. But he hadn't dared allow himself more than four or five hours sleep over the past five days, and those had been taken in snatches standing up. _"Guard duty really, really_ _sucks. Big time,"_ he mumbled to himself. Especially guarding someone who might try to Collect him in a heartbeat if she even laid eyes on him. He began to think that maybe he should just do another quick circuit around the block, counter-clockwise this time. Movement would certainly help.

Leaving his primary post, he first crossed the street to check out the Watchfire's entrance and peer in the front windows, then he cautiously circled around toward the back to survey the service area, all the while using his keen Dessarian sixth sense to feel for the presence of any other Migarians in the vicinity. Fortunately, he didn't sense anyone. He really didn't know what he might do if he did. But with cold certainty he was absolutely positive that, if he screwed up this last-chance-to-redeem-himself assignment, he'd be as good as dead. Or sincerely wish he were.

For the thousandth time he wondered how he ever managed to get himself into this situation in the first place. If it had been any other Tracker on the case but Daggon ... Well, it _was_ Daggon. Of _course_ it was. Who _else_ would it be? Who the hell else _could_ it be? Although Zin using Rhee as the guinea pig had been the equivalent of throwing out live bait, Daggon was the one Tracker the Hierarchy would've called in to handle this mass prison break anyway, even if he hadn't already been on the scene. It wouldn't have mattered if he'd been as far away as the distant side of the Outermost Clusters, they would've immediately upgraded his status from _on indefinite leave'_ to _active'_ and sent for him. 

And that, Nestov reminded himself, was _exactly_ why he was in this situation. Like all Dessarians, he had exceptionally strong survival instincts. He was determined to come out on the winning side of this, no matter which side that might be. If it had been any other Tracker there would've been little or no question. No other Tracker, as an individual, would stand a ghost of a chance against so many. Only Daggon did. And he had no wish to personally discover how much of this Tracker's considerable reputation might only be myth, legend or hear-say. Or how much of it might be the unvarnished truth.

Satisfying himself that all was peaceful and secure, Nestov retraced his steps to the front. Even at this hour a few lone cars were still cruising the streets, their occupants either headed for home or on their way to an early morning job. Some lost and bleary souls were probably even searching for an afterhours club still pulsing with an electronic imitation of life. Like he should be. A garbage truck rumbled past as he looked around, but at this early morning hour Chicago was as quiet as any major city ever really gets. In the background droned a just barely audible thrum of unrest, no different from the heartbeat of any city anywhere as it not quite sleeps.

"Nestov."

Nestov nearly jumped out of his skin at hearing his name uttered from just behind him so close to his ear, but he quickly processed exactly who it was. "Oh, man! Scare the freakin' crap out of me, why don't you!" 

"Sorry," the Tracker replied, although there was no hint of apology in his tone. 

__

"Hey! It's okay!" Nestov hastened. "I just had no idea you were even there. How do you ever _do_ that, anyway? _Nobody's_ supposed to be able to sneak up on a Dessarian! We got these early warning-like senses, you know? We're ultra-aware! But you! You could give a cat prowling lessons! How come I can't ever sense you?"

The Tracker ignored both the rant and the questions. "Any problems?"

"Well, _naw,_ not really. I've been up on the job, see. Dependable! Reliable! That's me! I've ..."

"Let _me_ decide if it's really not really'!" the Tracker snapped, cutting him off.

"Okay, _okay._ See, a pair of Vardians seemed to be checking out the place day before yesterday, about 2:30 in the pm. Standing about here, where we are. I was doing lookout on the Watchfire's roof. Doing a _great _job of it, too! Kept both eyes on them and laid low, blending in. Made _real_ sure they didn't see me. They hung around maybe ten minutes tops, then left. Haven't seen them since. I don't know who they were, didn't recognize them at all. Otherwise, all's been super quiet. Zip! _Nada."_

"Too quiet ..." the Tracker muttered under his breath.

"You _kidding,_ my man? With Zin locked away they've all gone splitsville. Headed for the hills! _Woooo!_ You've got them running for ..." The strong hand suddenly gripping the vulnerable back of his neck none too gently quickly shut him up. Nestov could recognize an irritable mood when he saw one, even when it was masked by the typically calm and placid outward aspect of a Cirronian. And he was in enough serious trouble with the Tracker that he wasn't about to risk adding to it. He considered himself damn lucky that he hadn't been Collected already. 

"Anything else?"

"Ah, well ... Look, my man, this really ain't any of my business, you know? And I really don't ..." the hand's grip tightened "... _Ouch!_ Okay! _Okay!_ Just don't mutilate the messenger! _Please?"_

The hand suddenly relented and dropped away. "Look, Nestov. I'm very fatigued. I've been traveling for over twenty hours in those miserable human excuses for air transport. I'm hungry and my bones are so cold they ache. So don't try my patience and just say it. With as little extra vocabulary as possible."

Nestov nodded his understanding of the request but closed his eyes before saying anything, almost expecting a blow. "It's about your lady. Nothing exactly _wrong,"_ he hastily added, "It's just she's ... Well, she's been spending a lot of her time with that detective. You know the one? Bruno? Four nights ago she stayed overnight at his place. Last night he was here. _All _night. Know what I'm saying here?" When the half-expected blow he was bracing for didn't come, he stole a sidelong glance up at the much taller man to gauge his reaction, but didn't see what he thought he would. "It ... It doesn't _bother_ you? You're _okay_ with that?"

"It's her choice. Such things are always the female's choice. My feelings about it are irrelevant."

The Tracker's quiet acceptance of the matter was too much for Nestov. "Man, you Cirronians are just plain _nuts!_ Loose in all the _wrong_ places! You guys just let your females push you around too much, you know that? _We _take control! _We_ simply pounce on the female _we_ want and ..."

"Ever pounce on a female who hasn't been displaying to you?"

"Well, no, but ..."

"Then all you're doing is pouncing on a female who's invited you to pounce on her. Now, if that's all you have to tell me, you may go."

"Yeah. Sure." Nestov said, edging away, hardly believing his good luck at _still_ being enough in the Tracker's good graces to remain alive _and_ unCollected. "If it don't bother you then it sure don't bother me. What else can I say? Been a pleasure. See you. Bye now. And you're welcome."

The Tracker turned from his intense scrutiny of the darkened windows of the apartment above the Watchfire. _"Nestov!"_ The smaller man instantly froze in place and hesitantly peered back over an almost cringing shoulder at the darkling-eyed Cirronian. "You've done a good job this time, Nestov. And I thank you for it. You've spared me a great deal of worry. Now go home and get some sleep. You look like you need it."

Nestov flashed him a broad grin and gave a jaunty thumbs up. "Anytime, my man. Anytime at all. We're _partners!"_ And he hurried away with a spring in his step, blithely ignoring the Tracker's usual _You aren't my partner'_ response. 

Although anxious to get upstairs, Cole stood rooted to the spot for nearly five full minutes, carefully scanning the entire surrounding area as far as his acutely attuned senses could reach in two long, slow, 360-degree sweeps. Although nearly vibrating from the effort (and giving himself a pounding headache in the process), the only Migarian he could detect anywhere was the rapidly moving away Nestov. That didn't mean there weren't any others around, of course. Too many were mentally disciplined enough to mask their lifeforce signatures and slip in under his radar and some, like most Dessarians, were extremely difficult to detect in any case – but this was the best he could do under the circumstances. It would have to be enough. He hoped it _was_ enough. As satisfied as he could make himself, he went around the back and let himself into the Watchfire's service entrance.

Once inside he still didn't head upstairs immediately. Security had to come first. What Nestov had told him was perfectly true: many of the fugitives viewed Zin's incarceration as their second escape, this time from a ruthlessly driving master who wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice the lot of them to his own ends. But Zin _did_ have his hard-core inner circle, his elite, and they would stop at nothing to free him. And the members of this elite inner-circle were by far the most dangerous and cunning of all the felons. The Watchfire was ground zero for their attentions and he had to be more vigilant than ever. 

Setting down his dufflebag he soundlessly made his way down to the basement and carefully checked the wine cellar, the freezers, the storage areas and Zin's prison, the vault. As far as he could tell, Zin was still in there (probably estivating by now) and all was exactly as it should be. Back up on the main floor he went through the kitchen, the pantry, the bar and the restrooms, double-checking all doors, windows and locks. Only when he was positive that nothing had been tampered with or compromised did he allow himself to unlock the door to the stairwell and ascend up to the apartment.

For a long moment Cole just stood in the hallway, eyes closed and breathing deeply, savoring the flood of scents and warm, familiar sensations of being home, soaking himself in the sense of comfort and rightness. Lemon furniture polish, pine cleanser, potpourri carpet deodorizer – Mel's been housecleaning, he noted – laundry detergent, bleach, fabric softener. From the kitchen on his left came the aromas of garlic and what had to be Lela's amazing lasagna (his stomach growled at that, reminding him just how very unsatisfying airliner food is), chocolate, pastries and coffee. _Good_ coffee. On his right, Mel's wonderful herbal shampoo, soap and bubblebath, her skin cream. A faint, lingering whiff of Vic's favorite aftershave in the air made him wrinkle his nose in annoyance. 

But most of all he heeded the vibrant siren call of Mel's lifeforce which he could feel coming from behind her bedroom door – which he'd actually been able to clearly sense from a distance of many blocks away. From the first, her lifeforce had been unique to him, so different from that of all other humans, that it enabled him to easily Track her to the Watchfire from the trainyard she'd left him at the very first day he'd been on this world. He shrugged out of his heavy coat and let it drop to the floor, moved to her door and quietly opened it. He listened to the soft rhythm of her slow breathing and knew she was deeply asleep. Even from the doorway he was acutely aware of her, of the radiant warmth of her body, of the special fragrances of her skin and hair which overlaid her own unique female scent. 

Cole moved over to the bed, gliding silent as a shadow so as not to awaken her, and looked down at her as she slept, dazzled by the dance of moonlight in her hair and the curve of the blanket over her hip. He felt as though he was frozen at some unknowable point in space and time, unable to go forward, unwilling to go back. He took a deep breath, letting it out on the wings of a sigh. _"I've missed you,"_ he said. Although barely above a whisper, his voice cracked under the sudden weight of the sentiment. He hadn't meant to say that, but the unexpected upswelling of emotion had blindsided him. 

He hesitantly reached a hand towards her sleeping form, his fingertips lightly brushing the loose strands of hair spilling across her pillow. They were as liquid silk, soft and lush to his touch as they curled around and slid through his fingers. As always, ever since his early lesson on human personal hygiene, a part of him wondered what it would be like to feel every naked inch of her pressed against his own bare skin with nothing between them but their own unchecked heat, wondered what her intimate touch on him would be like. He felt his body start to respond as human male was meant to respond to human female.and bit his lower lip against the by now too familiar urges, reluctantly drawing his hand back. For the umpteenth time he reminded himself: there was no point in yearning for what would likely never be. With another deep breath to internalize the regret, he turned away and left the room, silently easing the door closed behind him. 

Once in the shower, Cole finally stopped pretending. Stopped pretending his life was fine exactly the way it was and everything was well under control, stopped pretending his head didn't hurt, stopped pretending that the scalding hot water pounding at hard pulse on his neck and between his shoulder blades was all he really needed to get back to feeling normal. The zeal and purpose, the focus, that had driven him for days had leached away, and he felt tired, listless, weary to the very marrow of his bones, so tired his muscles were like jellied glue, so tired that he could very likely fall into a trance standing up. More, he was exhausted from the constant tension, the constant vigilance, the constant worry, the constant uncertainty. 

For one of the very few times in his existence he could honestly say that he was sick to death of the Track. For him that was a harsh admission. Never mind the status that came with his high rank, he'd always loved being a Tracker – the uncovering and solving of the Track's puzzle and pattern, the planning for and anticipation of the hunt, the wild adrenaline rush of the chase that sometimes carried him across dozens of worlds and solar systems, the instantaneous life-and-death decisions during confrontation that had to be made on the fly. He rarely felt quite as keenly alive, quite as _real,_ as when he was at the point of concluding a particularly dangerous Collection. 

But not lately. 

Not any more. 

Not, in fact, since Rhee.

Not that he'd ever had a choice in the matter. Now, then or ever. Like all those of his line, he had never been able to escape the bonds of his heritage. He was what he was. The High Prime knew it, and she took full advantage. As all the High Primes before her had. 

His resignation had been summarily rejected by direct decree from the High Prime, and his assignment as a Prison Guard was only considered a temporary, if indefinite, term of service. He'd been ordered out on several high-priority Tracks during those ten years – again by mandate of the High Prime – as his partial payment to her for even being permitted to serve in the same prison holding the one who had butchered his own family. 

He'd traded his soul for the chance to be in the right place. Just in case. It had been what he'd wanted. So why, then, did he have the nagging impression that he'd been manipulated?

He flexed and stretched his arms and shoulders with a joint-popping grunt, letting some of the tensions begin to sluice down the drain along with the shampoo and soap lather, as the pounding pulse of the water worked what magic it could soothing his muscles and heating his chilled blood and marrow. The deep-seated ache of cellular memory in his abdomen, however, still yammered at him of the massive, recently healed body damage that had nearly ended his life. 

Wounds and other physical injuries definitely came and went, he reflected, but the memories, the mental scars, they remained with him always. And he had far too many of those to even begin to count. Much of them he didn't want to remember. Much more he'd deliberately chosen to forget. He'd known more brutality, more wasted life, more degradation, more horror than any could ever possibly imagine. Among them were things he'd never talked about with anyone and never would, things that would never really go away. These things forever lurked in the darkness in his soul, watching and waiting for him. 

None would ever be able to fathom some of the things he'd done, or been forced to do, either out of necessity or desire or circumstance or whatever in the course of it. And the only way any could even presume to judge him for many of the life and death choices he'd made is if they'd been there, if they themselves had lived through it. 

He often thought it had to be something of a miracle that, after all this time, he was still sane. _Usually _sane, he silently amended. At least, he _thought_ he was usually sane. But then again, how could he know for sure? Certainly he wasn't after his family had been murdered. He'd been the one to find the mutilated bodies of his mate and daughter, so horribly mangled and brutalized they were all but unrecognizable. He'd snapped, gone over the edge into complete psychosis ...

__

Enough! he sternly told himself. He impatiently shut off that entire long-running, long-playing loop of thought along with the hot water tap. It led him nowhere. 

Toweling off and then tieing it around his waist, Cole made his way through the thick cloud of steam filling the room to the sink and wiped a forearm across the mirrored bathroom cabinet.to clear it. _You still in there_ _somewhere, Dag?_ he silently asked his human-appearing refection as he usually did, not expecting an answer. 

It had taken him quite some time to become accustomed to the image he saw in the mirror. Humans were a very strange-looking species, not unpleasant to look at by any means (not that any species ever considered its appearance to be unpleasant), merely transitional, incomplete and under-developed, a primitive interim form with too many vestigial parts and a number of oddities. 

The human foot, for example, had to be a cosmic joke. It was essentially flat to the ground and the body's weight and center of gravity were centered over an arch, making movement slow, awkward and clumsy. Better, the heel should be well elevated so that the center of gravity would be over the ball of the foot. That would allow for speed, grace and agility, as well as make for much better balance. As for the vertebrae and their support musculature, they were a mess. It came as no surprise to him that back pain and spinal problems were common aliments among humans: their evolution hadn't yet perfected the structural nuances of upright bipedal posture. And what were these useless flattened pads of fragile keratin atop all the digits? Claws, at least, would be functional, especially if they were retractable. Then there were these swellings – lips – around the oral opening. He couldn't recall ever meeting another species anywhere that had such a thing. The ear flaps – earlobes they were called – were another useless thing, incapable of movement and thereby making it difficult for humans to accurately pinpoint sound. Not that humans were capable of discerning much in the range of sounds, anyway. Their visual acuity was also entirely unremarkable, well below average, in fact. Their visible spectrum was restricted to a narrow field. Their sense of smell was poor to virtually non-existent. Their numerous higher senses were only barely functional, if at all, and that only in a rare few ... Only their senses of taste and touch were well developed. Level Three sentience without much in the way of sensory awareness. That was very odd indeed.

Even odder, humans had the reproductive biology and psychology one usually associates with a species very low on the food chain, not with a planet's dominant lifeform: obsessive sexuality coupled with year-round fertility leading to a staggering birthrate. And with the clear potential for that birthrate to be even more staggering than it already was. Six billion plus strong and still counting. Astonishing. There were more humans on their one planet than there were beings on all five Cirrons, Varda and Enix combined – including all their respective inhabited satellites. Humans were certainly an interesting entry in the Chronicles. And would bear continued close observation and monitoring.

And don't even get him _started_ on human fur patterning, he thought as he combed back his damp hair. Obviously the full pelt was on its evolutionary way out, but this remaining patchwork of heavy here, sparse there with areas ranging from soft to wiry was so very strange it bordered on the bizarre. Especially since some of it had to be scraped off on a daily basis. Well, it didn't exactly _have_ to be scraped off, but Mel insisted upon him doing so and it was not for him to oppose her in the matter. Thinking of which, it was still very early. Should he shave now or wait until later in the day?

So why was it he now found this morphed alien form so comfortable to be in? That he simply couldn't figure at all. It had none of the graces or freedoms of his natural Cirronian body – indeed, it had the oppressive weight of skin and bone and the wearing of garments was a requirement as well – yet these things had only come to bother him on an abstract, intellectual level, not in day to day living. Certainly it had taken him quite a while to properly adjust the body and finesse himself into the fit, and he'd made a number of alterations and improvements to the internal structure as a result, but still ...

He opened the bathroom cabinet and took out his razor and the shaving cream. May as well scrape his face now, while the bristles were well-softened from all the steam and hot water. With any luck, he wouldn't have to repeat the tiresome grooming chore until tomorrow, although that would depend on any plans Mel might have for him. Maybe tending bar tonight or escorting her somewhere, as she was sometimes wont to have him do. He gladly placed himself at her beck and call for anything and everything she wished, whenever, wherever and however she wished, but _please! Not_ another opera! His hearing was too sensitive for all that loud screeching. 

Cole critically examined his reflection as he lathered on the shaving cream. What _did_ Mel see when she looked at him? He'd come to understand that he was considered reasonably attractive for a human male. (Which in itself was rather amusing when he thought about it: he wasn't at all attractive for a Cirronian male. He was far too big and tall, even taller than most of the females, and much too broad and heavy through his upper body. Although by no means fat, he simply didn't have the elegant, slender, delicately gracile quality typical of the species. His features were much too strong as well and his eyes were ... Well, they were color they were). But knowing this human form was considered attractive by other humans couldn't tell him what Mel saw. Or what she felt about what she saw. Did he appeal to her at all? Oftentimes in the past he had the impression that she thought of him as she would a child, although he had to admit that didn't seem to be so much the case anymore. He'd probably never be sure what she was thinking. 

He shook his head. Mel. His vibrant, excitable, brave, feisty, stubborn, caring, totally incomprehensible and utterly maddening Mel. He even thought of her as being beautiful and graceful, although he couldn't say either of those things about her species. She sometimes seemed far too good to be true, especially when she looked at him with that bemused, bright-eyed expression that told him the joke was on him (again), or laughed so easily over some of life's little absurdities (he loved the sound of her laughter almost as much as he loved her big blue-green eyes), or fussed, fretted and worried over him, always looking out for him, or talked so passionately about the people and things she cared about, about life in general. Sometimes she would talk all afternoon and on into the evening on an endless variety of subjects and he was content just looking at her, watching the way she used her hands, the way her fingers moved with delicate, precise grace as she talked, the way her softly curled hair constantly defied her every attempt to tie it up or back, invariable coming loose and bobbing in gentle tendrils around her face. The way her mouth could crook in a half-smile or how she would nibble on her lower lip when considering something. Just being with her, even just knowing she was nearby, made him ridiculously happy. It was completely irrational, and he well knew it, but it was the truth.

Everything about her manner gave him the impression that she could be any kind of woman that she wanted to be, or needed to be, and still remain true to herself. She could likely match or beat any Prime or High Prime he'd ever known in that regard, and that was saying a great deal. And his heart continued to discover more and more beauty in her, in her mind, in her body and in her spirit, more for him to want and need. With Mel by his side, he didn't feel quite so alone, quite so disconnected. 

Mel had become his addiction, his one true anchor, his lifeline, his bond, someone he couldn't walk away from, couldn't seem to leave alone. It had been a long, long time since he had felt young, but Mel somehow made him see life through fresh eyes, making everything seem new to him. 

She'd acted aghast that he hadn't known what ice cream was. Or coffee. Or chocolate. Or Chinese food. Or Chicago deep dish pizza. Or Belgian waffles. Or Italian ices. Or a hotdog. Or hundreds of other things major and minor and even absurd: 

__

"What!?! You mean to tell me you've never been to an American shopping mall or seen a Hollywood movie? You've never been to an amusement park? Or a Chicago Cubs baseball game? You've never gone bird watching? Or sailing? How can you possibly think of yourself as being an advanced species?" 

"But I've piloted star cruisers, Mel. I've even sometimes captained them on deep space ..."

"And what makes you think that has any relevance, hmmm?" She laughed and took his arm. "You're now in the toddlin' town of Chicago, nicknamed the Windy City', located on the southern shores of Lake Michigan in the great State of Illinois, in the good old red, white and blue U. S. of A., on the continent of North America, on the blue planet Earth, the third planet from OUR star, which we happen to call the Sun.. You're not anywhere NEAR Migar anymore, Toto. So, come on! Let's get you properly civilized!"

"Okay, Mel."

Mel then proceeded to drag him in willing confusion all over Chicago to sample her strange corner of this even stranger Earth. His first few weeks here had been such a massive overload of data input and sensory experiences that he'd spent most of it spinning in a daze, just trying to process the information. The sensations of taste and touch had especially thrown him. Humans love to eat, and taste was still quite an experience for a species that can obtain all it's energy requirements by absorption, directly from the heat and light of a red star, without ever having to process solid food unless they want to. As for touch, that sensation had nearly paralyzed him. To be able to feel over every square inch of himself what could once only be sensed on his throat and chest was almost painful, almost beyond endurance. That he'd been able to function at all during that whirlwind introduction was still something of a wonder to him.

From the very beginning, Mel had somehow drawn out the rage and guilt that had held him captive and alienated him from life. She had freed him from the tight little cell of his own pain, freed his soul from the over-burdening loss and grief, the spiritual and emotional exhaustion of loneliness and isolation, freed him from suffering the ticking minutes of his life slowly driving him mad. Being with her had somehow filled the empty void in his heart and made him able to face each new day with renewed purpose and hope. Why all this was so, he didn't know. Maybe it was all the vitality she had. Maybe it was her astonishingly innocent capacity to believe that goodness and right would always prevail. Maybe it was because, no matter how down she was, she was always able to reach into herself to help or give solice or offer guidance to another. Maybe it was simply because Mel cared so deeply about so many things that it drove her to forge ahead to do what whatever she felt she had to do, even when she was terrified about it. Maybe it was because she so believed in and trusted him for no other reason than he'd asked her to. And he, in turn, came to honor such belief by trusting her with his life. Maybe it was all of it. 

Just the sound of her name echoing in his mind could send his heart skipping into double-time. How had one mere human female make his life so worth living again? Make him care again? When and how had she gained such total power over him? She'd become his friend, his companion, his assistant, his partner, his life. He'd be completely lost without her. She was the reason why he'd survived this long, why he hadn't allowed himself to just give up. With Mel he finally felt at peace. Home.

Home', Cole silently echoed to his strange reflection as he rinsed the residue of shaving cream off his face. Anywhere Mel was, he would probably always think of as his home. 

Initially, his behaviors with Mel were simply those of comforting and soothing to put her at ease about him being in her House to begin with, to help her accept him as a friend. Although he had thought that he'd have to groom her to be the helper he needed, she stepped into the role without any urging from him at all (even though she had no clear idea what he was doing), and soon made herself indispensable – so much so that he all too often found himself doing things _her_ way. He had planned, for example, to follow the Enixian fek-maln drug dealers home one by one and Collect them, but that wasn't good enough for Mel. As far as she was concerned, they had to be taken down immediately, their drug-dealing stopped cold because the drug kills humans, and the only way to do that was to take Kaden. Never mind that he would have gotten Kaden his way, he altered his plans for her. She insisted upon being the bait for Tev and she did it – against his better judgement – and nearly paid the price for it. She was a superb researcher, showed him where and how to find all manner of what, to him, was obscure information; she knew basic laws and Chicago police procedures; taught him how to correctly drive a car; arranged his legal defense when he was in jail; helped him gather discarded appliances and computers set out on the curbs on trash days ... Mel was a _very_ resourceful female. 

Somewhere along this winding way, their relationship evolved into something more, almost a cautious courtship. Inasmuch as it's Cirronian females who court the males, it was extremely awkward for him to behave contrary to all instinct, upbringing and conditioning to function as a human male would in this regard. But he sincerely tried, often fumbling, and all too often falling back on the Cirronian way of doing these things simply because he didn't know what else to do. 

Although he was certain Mel had detected the change in quality he'd given to her throat caresses, as well as their duration, being (mostly) human she lacked the capacity to detect the many subtleties and nuances of it that any full-blooded Cirronian female would recognize immediately. And because the signals he was getting from her were so mixed, he was sure that he was missing many of them, even wildly misinterpreting many others. After all, communication is far more than just a spoken language, even among humans. It involves intonations, eye contact, facial expressions, gestures, body and head angles, movements and postures – a whole host of things that are always species specific and were all completely new to him. Many still were. 

He thought that the idea of having Mel teach him how to slow dance was inspired but he was never quite clear just how he should proceed from there. And drove him to utter distraction. If she would just, for once, do it the Cirronian way and make that first move, show him unequivocally what she felt and what, if anything, she wanted of him and how ... But she never did. She only knew the human way.

He would hold her close in his arms and she would snuggle up against him, her head cradled on his shoulder, the two of them fitting together so perfectly in the undeniably intimate embrace it was as if they were meant to be. Often, her hand would seem to find a home on his chest, circling in gentle abstract patterns over his heart until spirals of need slowly began coiling and uncoiling unbidden within him. Did she have any idea what effect that simple action had on him? He could never bring himself to still those wonderfully teasing fingers of hers by covering her hand with his own when she did that, and would allow himself to just relax into her touch, sliding his hands down to the small of her back and pulling her closer, close enough for her to know his own stirrings. 

The last time they'd danced like that the music ended and they stood that way in silence for a solid minute, just gazing at each other, a minute that seemed to stretch out for all eternity. Neither of them moved, until a police cruiser whooped and screamed by outside and they both jumped at the sound. With a sigh of what he could've sworn was regret, Mel simply let her hand drop and bid him good-night, as she eventually always did. And like so many times before, he so wanted to say to her, _"take me with you",_ but such would be much too forward a request for any Cirronian male to ever dare make, and he was never quite able to get those four little words out, no matter how often he practiced them.

It had taken him a long time to realize that it wasn't just his inexperience or misreading, that Mel's signals really _were_ quite mixed, that she actually was ambivalent – not just about him, about whether she should have a relationship with him or not, but about her own emotions. She'd allowed herself to be used too often, had allowed herself to be manipulated too often, by men who she'd thought had cared for her, and she no longer trusted her own judgement.

When the Marital Bliss Seminars unexpectedly came up in his Tracking, it seemed like the perfect opportunity. Not only would the pair of Orsians he was hunting be there for easy Collecting, he would have the opportunity to learn more about the complications of human relationships, plus he and Mel would have time alone together and they'd be able to obtain some guidance as a couple. 

Nothing worked out as he thought it would. 

From the start, Mel had been nervous and fretful about going undercover with him on that Track, yet she'd been far more game about it than not, even insisting that she'd be alright with it and that they not only _should _do it, they _had_ to do it. _Together._ He almost felt like a child again when they first set off, a child on an exciting adventure, at one and the same time absurdly happy and anxious, each emotion feeding off the other until he really wasn't focusing at all. 

He tried very hard to put Mel and, admittedly, himself ease, joking (lamely) about the mirrors on the ceilings and reminding her that she knew what she was doing but he didn't, so it would have to be she who taught him. (This last was a mistake. He'd thought it would allow her to fully realize that she was the one in control, but that wasn't the way she'd taken it). Mel, however, didn't even start to relax until he playfully set that kissing head's monitor into the red zone and smoking. (For an energy being like a Cirronian, that was easy! He could've even carried it further if he'd wanted to and just blown the monitor up!). Later, he kissed her. For the first time. And for real. 

He'd been completely lost ever since.

Even before the Seminars, he'd been trying to imagine what their first time together might be like. The kiss they'd shared, and the seminars they'd attended, drew enough of it together for him to finally conjure a vivid picture. But all he felt from that image was an almost overwhelming sense of terror. Terror that Mel might somehow be repelled by him, terror that he wouldn't be anything she wanted or needed, terror that he would be so agonizingly self-conscious that he wouldn't be able to satisfy her, terror that he would be awkward and clumsy because he had no experience at all with the complexities of human sexuality and because humans took that sexuality so seriously. It did no good to tell himself that these terrors might be irrational. They had seized him, and they made him back away. 

If only he could locate that lost book ... 

And she didn't know any of it. He hadn't allowed her to know. 

What would be the point?

As he pulled on his sweatpants Cole suddenly clutched at his abdomen and hissed in a harsh sharp breath from between clenched teeth. Within a few moments, however, the ghostly stab of pain subsided and then vanished. He softly swore in Cirronian. This phantom pain would probably be with him for a few more days yet. 

Sydrax nearly gutting him had _not_ been a fun experience. And it had been his own clumsy fault. He'd lost his footing on the ice and Sydrax took quick and near-lethal advantage with a six inch blade, slicing him open from right hip to left lung, cutting through everything in between, then kicking him down a sewer. The oblivion of emergency systemic stasis was claiming him even as he fell the thirty-some-odd feet to the bottom. Most of his nervous system abruptly switched off, respiration ceased, heart rate plummeted to near nothing, metabolism stopped. He was so far gone so quickly that it barely registered when his pelvis and lower back fractured as he hit. For all intents and purposes, he'd been as good as dead. Fortunately, the temperature was just low enough, and there was just barely enough oxygen remaining in his system, to allow for the nearly three-and-a-half hours it took for the extensive damage to heal. 

Then to revive, not only having to go through all the loathsome but expected after-effects of a deep healing stasis – _plus_ the debilitating effects of being near frozen – but to also be facing an army of hungry sewer rats intent on devouring the 200-pounds of fresh meat that had dropped into their midst ... He shuddered in revulsion, remembering. 

No, not fun at all.

He could very well have died in the dank blackened depths of that sewer. Very nearly did, in fact. If Sydrax had finished the job and actually disemboweled him instead of just cutting him wide open ... If the temperature had been much higher ... Or lower ... If his body hadn't had enough stored oxygen in it to see him through ... If he hadn't revived when he did, before the rats launched from quick nipping tastes into a full-fledged feeding frenzy ... If ... 

Mel would've never known what had become of him. 

And that was the most frightening thing of all. 

He stared at his reflection, as if he could somehow find a solution in the mirror. 

He well knew that, in the scheme of things, the Hierarchy wouldn't think that the remaining felons running around loose on a Class One Quarantined world as brutally violent as Earth was particularly significant, certainly not significant enough to justify the continued involvement of a Tracker of his rank and caliber. Sooner or later he would have to return to Cirron and Sar-Top – probably sooner and likely before he was done. Moreover, he knew with certainty that his years languishing as a Prison Guard were over. Once the prisoners he'd caught were turned in and the interminable debriefings were finished, he'd be pressed into service again, more than likely be given a new assignment almost immediately. Or be placed on ready call for one. Or perhaps one was already waiting for him. And if that disgusting reproductive mandate had been passed ...

No. It was useless. He would never be granted release to return to Earth. Not even if he lowered himself to beg for it. It simply wasn't an important enough world. And since when has any of Cirron's High Primes released a _Traaquore?_

Only once, his reflection soberly reminded him. 232.7 million years ago. 

As Jess would've put it, _no way in bloody hell!' _

But how could he bring himself to leave her?


	5. The Rest of Early Morning: Mel and Cole

****

V. THE REST OF EARLY MORNING THE NEXT DAY: MEL AND COLE

The scarlet numerals of the digital bedside clock read 4:04 am. Mel raised her head just far enough to register that information, then dropped it back onto her pillow, mumbling _"there's no such time as four o'clock in the morning". _ But as she lay in bed she realized, oddly enough, that she was both wide awake and refreshed, even at that hour. She stared into the brightly moon-lit dark, wondering what had woken her up in the first place and trying to hang on to her now fast-fading dream, trying to remember. Her grandmother had been in it and she'd been telling her something. Something very important ...

Mel could've sworn she'd heard it raining hard before, but the windowpanes were dry. Then the tantalizing aroma of freshly brewed coffee, the blackberry/Kona blend, came to her. There was also movement coming from somewhere in the apartment, then the sound of a chair lightly scrapping on linoleum tiles. The kitchen. Mel raised her head again, seeing the light seeping in under her door. 

Cole had finally returned home.

Her head dropped back to the pillow like a lead weight. _Now what?_

Her grandmother's face swam in the inner vision of her dream as she had looked in her final few days, old and very ill. She was beckoning her over, her lips moving, saying, _"Melanie, if you remember nothing else I've ever told you, remember these two things: ..."_ But the rest of her words were a fading distant echo beyond Mel's ken.

She heard the microwave _ding'_ and could smell the aroma of reheated lasagna. Well, Cole wouldn't be much of a Tracker if he couldn't Track down Lela's lasagna, would he? She had to smile to herself at that thought. 

Her grandmother's words echoed again, this time a little clearer: _"... First, the things you leave unsaid will haunt you far longer than any of the things you do say, even beyond your grave..."_ Strain as Mel would, however, the rest of her grandmother's words were not quite audible.

The microwave _dinged'_ again and now she could smell the garlic bread.

The words from her dream echoed a third time, very faint, wavering and distant, but now the last part was starting to come clear: _"... Second, when you have enough years behind you to look back on, you'll end up regretting many things. You'll regret things you'd done and you'll regret things you'd not done. Of these last, most of all ..." _ The echo faded and was gone, but Mel didn't need to hear the rest of it from a dream. She sharply remembered her grandmother telling it to her firsthand: _"... you'll regret the things you should've done, the things you could've done, the things you so wanted to do if only you'd been able to gather your courage. And those, my dearest child, are the very bitterest regrets of all."_

Mel closed her eyes and silently thanked her grandmother, steeled herself, then got out of bed and pulled on her terry robe. Today was, as the tired feel-good saying went, the first day of the rest of her life. It was long past time she started figuring out what that life was going to be.

Cole caught his breath as Mel unexpectedly walked in on him in the kitchen. Her freshly washed hair was wild and loose, shining in a red-gold aura of curls and bouncing around her head and shoulders as she moved. Her face was free of makeup and still pale from sleep, the freckles on her nose and cheeks adorable, her lips very red and somewhat swollen. He had to look away a moment against the sight of her, caught by the upwelling of his own conflicted emotions, of his near overwhelmingly powerful need not just to touch her, but to completely lose himself in her. 

"Cole! Welcome back! Just get in?"

"Good morning, Mel. I got home about an hour ago. You're awake unusually early."

She shrugged and went over to the _Mr Coffee_ to pour herself a mug before Cole drank it all. She loved coffee, but if she drank only a fraction of what he did – he guzzled it by the carafe rather than by the mug – she'd probably be in renal failure. She'd often teased him that it would be more efficient if he dispensed with the mug altogether and just took his coffee intravenously. "Went to bed very early last night. I was probably dead to the world by 7:30 or so. I trust your business trip' was a success?"

Cole blinked at that. _Dead to the world'?_ Obviously Mel wasn't dead, so that had to be yet another of those obtuse human expressions. Her language was maddeningly riddled with them. But that wasn't what was bothering him. Mel always, _always_ ran up to him and gave him a quick hug and a kiss on the cheek when he returned home from a Collection, especially when he'd been gone for a while. He'd come to look forward to it. But this time she hadn't. And was it only his imagination or was she deliberately maintaining her distance? Yes, she was. A great deal of awkwardness had been growing between the two of them, especially since the Seminar. And especially lately. Often, stress and tension virtually poured off of Mel in waves, particularly when they were alone together. It left him feeling abandoned, bereft, even frightened, as if something infinitely precious was slipping away. But he couldn't figure out what to do about it. The closer he tried to get to Mel, the more he tried to talk with her or reassure her, the more she seemed to back away from him. He'd hoped that these few days apart might have given her time to sort out whatever was bothering her – and she did seem to be calmer, albeit much tighter than she'd been lately – but something was still off ... No, not off. Something about her manner had _changed. _

"It was much more successful than I'd hoped," he reported, trying not to stare at her as he considered what that change might be. "I went after Sydrax, Haag and Bacor and ended up Collecting all three of them plus an additional eleven I hadn't expected. And Sydrax really gave me quite a chase. London, Amsterdam, Bonn, Berlin, Paris. I finally caught him in Munich with his pants down."

"Thank God you managed to snare that child-murdering psychopath! And with his pants down', huh?" Mel smiled faintly at that and leaned back against the kitchen counter, shaking her head with bemusement and sipping her coffee. Cole was usually so literal. Could it be he was finally catching on to human expressions? "You mean Sydrax wasn't expecting you?"

"Oh, he very _definitely_ wasn't expecting me, Mel," Cole affirmed with clear satisfaction in his tone, leaving out what had transpired in Paris. One hand absently pressed and massaged his abdomen. "And his pants certainly were down. I cornered him in the men's room at the airport. He ..."

Mel chuckled at that bit of news and held up a hand. _"Whoa!_ Graphic details really aren't necessary here, Cole. I think I've got a pretty good mental picture of how _that _Collection must've gone down." She stared at his massaging hand a moment, mesmerized. Didn't the two of them look just like a long-intimate married pair, she thought, he barefoot and wearing nothing but sweatpants and his unbelted terry robe; she also barefoot, her terry robe only loosely belted, and wearing an old knee-length cotton sleepshirt. She gave herself a mental shake to bring herself back to the reality of it. "Um ... And the others?"

"I caught up with Bacor first, in London, later Haag in ..." Cole grinned "... The Haag." 

"Well, there _is_ a certain literary justice in that," Mel agreed. "What of the unexpected eleven?"

Cole shook his head in frustration. "Like Haag and some of the others who chased us in London not too long ago: _not _on my list of escapees. I detoured to hunt them down and Collect them wherever I happened to run into their Tracks while after the others. Six Vardians, three Nodulians and a pair of Orsians. I don't even know who they are but, since some of them I _know_ are wanted, and all are at least guilty of killing humans to obtain their bodies, I took the time. I've been out of contact with Sar-Top and Cirron for far too long now and I'm not certain ..." 

Mel refreshed her coffee and enjoyed the last remaining pastry from the other night as Cole ate his early morning lasagna dinner and rambled. She knew he was just using her as a sounding board, considering out loud the various theories he had of who these other aliens were and why and how they came to be here on Earth. Half-thinking that perhaps this might all go above and beyond Zin, he was completely losing her as he threaded his thoughts in with the complicated politics of the various planets and the numerous coalitions and special interest groups within the Miger Alliance and the Assembly of Worlds it was a part of. She didn't understand good old boy' American politics, let alone this complex, multi-dimensional web of alien solar system skullduggery and intrigue he was weaving. Finally, she interrupted, not at all liking what she was seeing about Cole's uncharacteristic massaging behavior or the occasional quick shadow that darkened his features.

"Cole? Why do you keep rubbing your belly? Are you in some sort of pain or discomfort?"

His hand dropped away almost guiltily. "It's ... nothing, Mel. Really. I'm completely healed."

__

"Healed?" Mel's voice rose to a squeak. "You were _injured?"_

"I'm able to regenerate small amounts of tissue, Mel." Cole got up to rinse off his plate in the sink, sadly noticing that Mel immediately relinquished the space to move to the opposite side of the kitchen aisle "I told you this once before. It's not a problem."

"Yes. I remember from the two times you tangled with Medoran. And that time with Dunn. But I don't recall you worrying at those wounds. You just healed them and went on as if they'd never happened. But this is different. Those were basically surface wounds. This is ..." Realizing that Cole seemed evasive, Mel suddenly changed tactics. "Exactly what kind of injury was it this time? What happened to you?"

Cole was glad his back was to her. He wasn't sure he'd be able to meet her eyes. Mel had never been aware of how severely Dunn had wounded him, or that the deep ache of it had actually lingered for several days. The only way she'd known he'd been wounded at all was that his sweater had been ruined with a blood-stained hole. She'd never known him to be this badly injured before and at the moment his gut just didn't feel right. "Mel, please. It's nothing to worry about. It's over and done." 

"If it's so nothing to worry about' and so over and done', then why won't you _tell _me?"

"I'm fine, Mel. Really," Cole said as he refilled his coffee mug.

__

"I'm fine, Mel,'" she parroted with a frustrated groan, beginning to get angry. "You were very badly injured this time, weren't you? _Not_ just some nasty scratches. _Right?"_

"It was ... somewhat more severe than a scratch, yes," he agreed softly, turning from the coffeemaker to face her and give what he hoped was a reassuring smile. "But I really am fine now. It's not even worth talking about."

"Cole! _Please!_ Don't _do_ this! _Talk_ to me! _How_ somewhat more severe'?"

"Mel ... You shouldn't worry yourself about these things. I'm quite resilient. More than you know. And I really am all healed. See? Not a mark left on ..." Too late, Cole realized that his hand had just traced the full arc of the cut from just above the point of his right hip bone up through the lower third of his left lung.

Mel turned near-white and went very still, covering her mouth with a trembling hand. She hadn't missed the extent of Cole's hand motion. And she knew Sydrax had a sick thing for butchery with big and very ugly knives. She began to shake. "God_damn_ you! Some things are a universal constant, aren't they? No matter _how_ evolved the species, a _macho_ gene is always attached to the male chromosome!" 

"Mel, I don't understand why you're so ..."

__

"Upset? Is that what you were about to say? You don't understand why I'm so _UPSET?"_ Her voice began rising to a wail. "You get yourself _gutted_ by a sadistic maniac and _you_ don't understand why I'm so _UPSET?_ You nearly get yourself _killed_ and _you_ don't ..."

"But you _are_ getting upset, Mel. And there's no ..." Cole began reasonably, but the phantom lurking in his belly chose that moment to strike again, this time with raw vengeance. The coffee mug flew from his hands, shattering on the linoleum as he staggered, then doubled over, falling to his knees with a shrieking groan, clutching both arms tightly around his middle. He was reliving the full traumatic agony of it all over again, the sharp stab and vicious twisting of the broad, wickedly snaggle-toothed blade as it gouged deep and shredded its way up and through his body.

__

"COLE!!!"

As suddenly as it struck, the pain withdrew to the periphery of his awareness, leaving Cole feebly thrashing on the floor, panting and shuddering, his teeth chattering, his senses disorientated. 

Mel was by his side in an instant, quickly but closely accessing the extensive area Cole had indicated, hardly believing the undeniable evidence of her own hands and eyes that his flesh was whole, unmarked and unblemished. But Cole wasn't himself and _something_ was very wrong. Trying to stifle her mounting panic, she hastily threw one of his arms over her shoulders and wrapped one of hers around his waist, attempting to pull him up. "Cole? Can you stand? Lean on me as much as you have to but you're a big guy and ... Cole? Can you hear me? _Cole! Please! I need you to help me help you! _

As if from a great distance he heard, and automatically moved, struggling to comply. Using Mel's strength as a brace, and with his other hand for leverage on a cabinet door, Cole wordlessly managed to get his legs under him and regain his feet, but his legs were too wobbly to fully support him. 

"Come on, Cole," she urged, gripping him tightly. "Stay with me just a few seconds. Let's get you laid down." Seeing how far gone he was and knowing she couldn't manage his weight and bulk for long, Mel half-carried, half-dragged him to her bedroom as fast as she could, letting him drop onto the mattress just as her quaking knees were threatening to give out from the strain. 

But the ravening phantom wasn't done with him yet. With a keening whine in his throat, Cole drew his legs up to his chest, curling himself into a tight shivering ball as the horrific pain moved in for the assault, repeatedly stabbing and slashing through him. Mel stroked her fingers through his hair a moment, vainly trying to provide comfort, frantically trying to figure out what she could do for him. _Abdominal pain. Use either heat or cold. Heating pad? Ice pack? Cole was a heat-loving Cirronian. Yes, a heating pad – like she sometimes used to relieve her menstrual cramps._

Mel raced for her closet. She had two heating pads on the upper shelf, the older of which she'd always meant to throw out but somehow never had. Something was glitchy with the heat regulator in the thermostat, and it's temperature output would quickly climb to a dangerously hot 140-degrees or so no matter what setting it was turned to. It might be exactly what Cole needed. Unless the type of pain he was experiencing actually needed cold ... She couldn't think about that now. She'd know soon enough if he'd need ice, anyway.

Getting Cole to straighten out from his fetal position so she could administer to him wasn't easy. He was resistant to moving or being moved, his features were contorted in a mask of agony, his eyes were glazed over, and he was so out of it he didn't seem to even recognize her or understand English anymore. With gentle but persistent coaxing and petting, however, she finally managed to get him stretched out flat on his back. All his abdominal muscles were spastically writhing beneath her hands like a nest of angry vipers, and there was a buzzing' sensation from deep within that felt like short-circuiting flares of electricity gone haywire. Hoping this was the right thing to do, hoping that she'd correctly guessed this was abdominal pain and heat would help, Mel lay the heating pad in place, prepared to forcefully hold it down on him if necessary, and nervously braced herself on the edge of the bed beside him to wait. 

Within a few minutes, although the heating pad had become too hot for her to keep a hand on anymore, Cole's breathing did seem to be easier, the grim mask was slipping from his features, and his complexion appeared less waxy, his normal color beginning to return. 

Five minutes later, she heard Cole tell her in a very tired voice: "Feels good, Mel. Exactly what I needed."

Until he spoke, Mel hadn't realized that she had been nearly holding her breath the whole time in anxious dread. She exhaled in a long shudder, almost sobbing with relief. "Good. I'm glad. Is the pain gone now? Can I ... get you anything? Water, maybe?" 

"Thank you, Mel." Cole reached up a none too steady hand and caressed her throat, trying to reassure her. "The pain is almost gone. Manageable. Water would be good. Hot water."

She nodded and patted the hand at her throat, giving him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. "Be right back. Just don't move."

He gave her a wane smile in return. Moving wasn't yet a viable option. How did he get here, in Mel's bed? He scarcely remembered. This was certainly not how he'd ever envisioned himself being here. Technically, Mel had forbidden him from ever entering her bedroom without knocking first and receiving permission to do so. But he always checked on her several times throughout the night as she slept (sometimes he even sat cross-legged on the floor beside her bed watching her sleep, needing to be near her for a while), just as he made irregular rounds of the apartment, the bar and the basement, and usually scanned the surrounding neighborhood from the roof as well. He'd never allow a mere technicality to get in the way of his keeping Mel as safe as he possibly could. It felt very strange, all wrong, to be invited here like this. 

Abruptly, the last of the pain released him and Cole went limp, drained and exhausted from the ordeal. He hoped that was the last of it – or, if not, he was over the _worst_ of it. Either way, he reminded himself, it was better than the alternative.

"Here you go. Big glass of very hot water." Mel was trying so hard to smile and be cheerily supportive for his sake that she was near to crying. "You're not nauseous or anything, are you?" 

"No, Mel. Nothing like that."

"Good to know. But no more heavy foods like lasagna for a while, just in case." Mel sat down beside him and helped him raise his head enough to drink. He downed the entire 16-oz. glass without even coming up for air, but declined her offer of getting more.

As she placed the empty glass on the nightstand, Cole's hand came up again, a little steadier this time, to soothingly caress her throat. "Mel? Did I remember to thank you?"

"Yes. Yes, you did." Mel forced herself to smile and allowed herself to relax into Cole's warm, calming touch, needing it, also knowing that he needed to give it. That was her Cole. _He_ was the one hurt, yet he was more concerned about how _she_ was taking it. 

Mel hadn't really figured how things were going to go between them when he got home, but this nothing to worry about' and over and done' thing definitely _wasn't _on her list of possible scenarios. That had _not_ been just a scratch Cole suffered. It was much worse. And it took a hell of a lot more for him to heal it than regenerating piddling small amounts of tissue'. _But if he was healed, why was he still in such pain?"_

"It was Sydrax, as I think you've realized," Cole said, guessing some of her thoughts. He continued caressing her throat with soothing energies, sensing both her lingering annoyance at his initial reticence to talk and her tightly reined anxiety. "A few days ago in Paris. I was in such a hurry to get him Collected and get out of the cold that I was careless with my footing on the ice. He came in under my defenses and gutted me, forced me into a deep healing stasis." 

"Deep healing stasis?" Mel ran the three words through her mind a moment, both all together and individually, trying to get a feel for the sense of it. "You've never mentioned such a thing before."

"I've never mentioned it because ..." He shrugged. "I just never do, is all. Force of habit, I guess. You might say that it's ..." He hesitated, unsure of how much to tell her, then decided on the usual. "... a genetic anomaly in my line." Not _exactly_ accurate on several counts, but close enough. "Very few are able to do such a thing and almost no one is even aware that I can. It's better that way. Safer. If Sydrax had known, he would've taken the extra time to disembowel and finish me off." 

"Finish you ..." Mel went very pale and began to shake. She had to pull back, away from the reach of his overly warm and highly distracting touch, and try to get a grip. Cole had nearly died. _Again._ Were there still other times she _didn't _know about? _Probably._ She took a deep breath. "Okay. Explain this stasis thing to me."

Cole considered a moment. A dry and unemotional textbook recital would likely be best. "At its simplest, stasis is an autonomic systemic response that serves to repair massive internal injuries which would otherwise prove fatal. There are many levels and stages of it, the deepest only marginally above true death. Each time is always somewhat different. There are certain time and temperature constraints, there are limits as to how much organs can be regenerated, each type of cell involved can only be encouraged to knit or multiply just so fast and ..." He shrugged again, not wanting to further upset her by delving too deeply into the details. "It's a complicated process, subject to many inherent internal and external variables, some controllable to one degree or another, but most not."

"Wait a minute. You're _not_ saying you can recover from _any ..."_

"Nothing corporeal can recover from everything, Mel," he said carefully. He couldn't lie to her about this but, at the same time, he knew it would only be one more thing to worry her. "It's the nature of being corporeal. Stasis is _not_ a cure-all. And not everything _can _be healed. One can just as easily die when under stasis as come out of it. Especially on the deeper levels."

Mel gnawed at her lower lip and tried to digest the ramifications. Cole had come out of this stasis thing _this_ time. And probably had at least a few other times in his past. Maybe even more than a few. But _next_ time? Or the time after that? _Damn_ their lone-wolf procedures, anyway! _No backup!_ While he'd explained why it had to be so in this prison break Track – and she fully understood the reasons – she still _hated _it. "No wonder Sydrax wasn't expecting you," she said to derail herself from that familiar but nerve-wrecking train of thought. "He thought he'd killed you. He'll probably tell the other prisoners that you arose from the dead to Collect him."

"I don't doubt it," Cole affirmed with remembered amusement. "It's the type of thing that's contributed to my reputation. Many even believe that I _can't_ be killed, can't be beat. So they fear me. And their fear can give me just the edge I might need. Such things have served to make my Tracking easier."

Cole suddenly winced, but this time the pain was only a fleeting stab, not as deep. "Oh, Cole. _No!_ Are you in pain again?" While Mel fussed over him and tried to erase the lines that had appeared on his brow with her fingertips, Cole realized from the lightness and hesitancy of her fingers that, since the heating pad was driving his body temperature closer to his more normal Cirronian range, he was becoming almost too hot for her to touch. 

"I'm fine, Mel," he gently assured her. "It's only the pain of cellular memory. It isn't real, even though it feels so. Like that of a severed limb, I think. It comes and goes, but it _will _vanish for good shortly. This I know for certain." Just like the ache in the bones of his ribs, back and pelvis, and the pain in his left lung, were already a thing of the past. He reached up to smooth her hair back, unsuccessfully attempting to tuck the tangled curls back of her ears, careful not to touch her skin. "You're too much of a worrier, Mel. I was only trying to spare you additional worry. Was that so wrong of me?"

Mel's soft, quiet laugh was devoid of mirth. She was only a hair's breadth away from sobbing. Or screaming. She wasn't sure which. _She'd nearly lost him! _"You really don't get it, do you, Cole? I don't just worry. I _obsess._ About _everything._ It's my nature to be an uptight obsessive worrywart. It's one of my more lovable and endearing qualities. I don't need wild speculation layered on top of all my normal obsessiveness, but that's all I've got to go by whenever you aren't open about ... things. Can't we at least _try_ to keep all this insanity within the realms of reasonably _constructive_ worrying?" 

"Yes, Mel. I'm sorry." Cole gathered his strength and started to get up, uncomfortable about being in Mel's bedroom and in her bed under these circumstances, pained both for being the cause of her stress and anxiety, and because his own heightened body heat was getting in the way of his attempts to comfort her. He was also ashamed at being this vulnerable and weakened from mere phantoms. He knew this last was irrational, but Mel had brought him into her House and given him her help without knowing the full extent of the dangers beforehand and he had to be stronger than this for her sake. Especially now. Her life could well depend on it. 

"And just _where_ do you think you're going?" Mel had moved to stand in the way of him getting out of bed. She had her hands on her hips and was looking down at him with exasperation.

"I have work to do, Mel," he explained uncertainly, "Downloads that I have to "

Mel shook her head and rolled her eyes at the ceiling. "You're not going anywhere for a while, Cole. You're going to stay in that bed flat on your back with the heating pad and rest until you've gone without so much as a twinge for at least twelve full hours. 

"Mel, it isn't necessary for me to ..."

"Cole, please! Most of your work will keep for another twelve hours, even another seventy-two hours. Even more than that, if need be. The important thing now is that you be fully recovered." 

"I'm already healed, Mel, and ..."

__

"YES! I _agree_ with you. Physically, you're healed. I can _see_ that! But you're not yet fully _recovered!_ You're _not Superman_, Cole! An assault like you've been through is horrendous. Stasis abilities or not, your body and your mind are still sorting through the trauma of it. That's what phantom pain's largely about: severe trauma. If you allow yourself the extra time, you'll be all the stronger for it as a result." 

Of course Mel was right. He knew this. And he had certainly intended on taking it slow and easy over the next few days to give himself that necessary time to fully restore himself. He was just uncomfortable about being in her bed like this. And it simply wasn't right. "I shouldn't be turning you out of your bed, Mel. Humans need their sleep."

"Not a problem, Cole," she said with firm finality. "I'm not using it right now, anyway. And I can always sleep on the sofa for a night or three if I must. I've certainly done it before."

Cole well knew the stubborn, I'll-brook-no-arguments-here-we're-doing-this-my-way attitude of female authority Mel was giving him. "Yes, Mel," he sighed, capitulating. "Thank you."

Mel began going through her closet and drawers, selecting her day's clothing. _"Now!_ I know all that heat probably feels great and it's likely helping, but you'd better turn down that Cirronian thermostat of yours a bit before you, um ..." she reddened slightly, "... scorch my sheets. Meanwhile, I'll begin printing out the downloads for you. Those I think you can read while in bed. Will that work for you? Or would you rather go with the laptop? ... No, forget that. You'd have to sit up for the laptop and I think it best if you remain laying down. Print-outs it is."

"Okay, Mel." Cole watched her bustling about, chattering up a storm as she always did when she was nervous, excited or upset, much as she had done when they first met. But Mel's dizzying whirlwind mode was different this time, more frantic. Then with a _"I'll have the first of the print-outs for you within about half an hour or so,"_ she was out the door, leaving him to repair the heating pad's thermostat (and hence lower his own) and contemplate Mel's bed and her bedroom from a new angle as he wondered how he'd be able to read lying flat on his back all day. 

Once Mel had closed the bathroom door behind her, she slumped back against it, slowly sliding to the floor like a deflating balloon, her legs no longer able to support her as all her accumulated pains and sorrows, all her many fears and terrors turned liquid and began to release, pouring hotly down her face. She wanted to slither away on her belly like the miserable, disgusting slime she felt she was, hide herself deep in the depths of a dark hole in the ground somewhere and never come out. 

In her heart she knew that, stasis or no, Cole had come very close to dying this time in the line of doing his impossibly difficult and dangerous job, even if he hadn't said so. And what was _she_ doing? _She_ was trying to judge his reading of Dr Sullivan's stupid book! _What idiocy! What pettiness!_ Worse, she was trying to pressure this poor man – whose concerns were always first and foremost for _her_ no matter _his_ plans _or_ his pain – into a relationship he'd made it clear he _didn't_ want! So _WHAT_ if she didn't agree with his reasons? They were _HIS_ reasons and he was _entitled_ to them! 

Although her heart wanted to believe that she and Cole belonged together, she also realized that she could never even come close to replacing all that he'd lost. She'd sensed the spiritual pain he was in and knew it ate at his soul like corrosive acid, slowly but surely destroying him. Often, she so ached for him that all she wanted to do was cradle him in her arms, give of her strength and comfort, and release him from all that suffering. Yet just the thought of doing so made her stupid human hormones kick in, so she never had. Didn't he _already _have more than enough life and death problems, worries and complications in his life without adding _her_ stupid hormonal neediness to the mix? The depths of her utter selfishness, her weakness, in the face of so much of his selflessness and strength, mortified her.

Cole was the dearest, most caring and compassionate friend and companion she'd ever known, could ever even imagine knowing. What was _wrong_ with her? They shared so much together, they were so close – or recently _had been_ very close, could easily _continue_ being close – if she'd simply _lay the hell off._ Why couldn't she just be satisfied with all that they _did_ have and leave it at that? She should consider herself honored, privileged, _blessed,_ to have ever known him at all!

Mel angrily got to her feet and scrubbed both hands over her face, wiping away her streaming tears and forcing the rest back into their bottomless well. _Great!_ Now her eyes are raw, swollen and bloodshot from crying. _Time to climb out of your selfish angsty fantasies, Porter. You never were that big a fan of all those sudsy 1940's Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwick tear-jerkers, anyway. (Bogie and Bergman in "Casablanca" are another story). Let's get you with the proper program here. Cole needs your assistance and you WILL assist. He depends on you._ She peered in the mirror. Okay. Not _too _terrible. Nothing that a few drops of _Visine_ and mascara couldn't set to rights. 

By the time she'd finished pulling herself together, getting her face on, combing the snarls out her hair and dressing, Mel realized that nearly three quarters of an hour had gone by. _Not so good a start to the new you,' Porter. Move it! You promised Cole print-outs within half an hour._ And she hadn't cleaned up the spilled coffee and broken mug on the kitchen floor, yet. _Get a grip! Focus! _

A quick check on Cole assured her that he was comfortable. He was resting in that eerie restorative Cirronian trance state, the one that had so thoroughly spooked her the first time she'd ever seen it. Something indescribably weird – _face it, Porter: he's an inhuman alien_ – about those flickering liquid lights in his half-open eyes ... _(Remembered note to self: Never walk in on a Cirronian in a trance state after watching an uninterrupted PBS midnight showing of the original "Night of the Living Dead". It messes with your head). _ She knew that even in a trance Cole was completely aware of what was going on around him. His face might remain expressionless, and he might not move or speak for the twenty minute to one hour duration of it, but he could both see and hear quite clearly. (And, Mel was sure, his sense of smell was also working just fine). And he could be fully awake, alert and ready for anything in less than a heartbeat if he had to be. 

Mel turned and hurried to the War Room. 

Cole roused himself from his trance the moment she left, his mind racing. Mel was so attuned to life, having a natural empathy that most lifeforms of his experience seem to have no concept of. It was what had drawn him to her in the first place. But as big as her heart was, it was also very fragile. She had so much grief, pain, doubt and fear in her life, yet she thought nothing of putting herself at risk for those she loved and cared about, for things she believed in. She freely gave of her affections, she gave of her love, she gave of her very soul. Time and again she'd proven herself to be caring, loving, supportive, and fiercely devoted, yet she also had the very human capacity to be selfish, manipulative and even sometimes sneaky – although he knew that she hated herself for these tendencies. From the beginning he'd been able to see all these things shining in her eyes, in her heart and in her manner. Now her eyes showed him something else, something which frightened him to his core for he'd seen the same thing looking back at him in mirrors: deep, fathomless despair. Worse, an inner voice told him that he was at the center of it.

In the War Room, Mel stacked a ream of paper in the printer and checked out Cole's desktop folder. _Nearly 450 downloads? In only five days?_ She was going to be at this forever! Meanwhile, yet another automatic download on another computer screen was in progress from some Oriental site – Korean, Chinese or Japanese, she guessed, not familiar enough with the differences in characters to be certain. _Oops!_ It was a military-based site. Something to do with the communications and spy satellites Cole routinely borrowed' to Track with, she was willing to bet. She'd have to have another talk with him about being more careful with that kind of thing: it wouldn't do to start an international incident, one country huffing and puffing and blaming another for playing with its toys, neither realizing the truth of it. 

Programming the automatic printer queue to feed in all downloads in order from first to last received, Mel set the universal matrix to translate everything not in English into Cirronian. Now all she had to do was staple like report pages with like, keep spoon-feeding the printer with paper and ink, _plus_ take care of the inevitable paper jams, _plus _be running up and down the stairs all day managing the bar. _Such FUN this is going ..._

She started at the sound of the gentle, concerned voice coming from the doorway. "What's wrong, Mel? Is it something that you humans prefer not to talk about, or one of those things where talking proves helpful?" Cole inquired, worried about her and very much wanting to comfort her if he could.

"Cole ... You should really be staying in bed," she reminded him, suddenly flustered.

"I don't think I'll be having any more phantom attacks, Mel. Raising my body temperature to more normal levels for a short while took care of it."

"But, _still ..."_ she stubbornly insisted.

"Is it your wish I remain in bed?"

Even more flustered by the implications of his softly spoken question, Mel sent a quick prayer of thanks to the printer gods for picking that moment to jam up the paper feed to distract her attentions but, before she'd even gotten to the _amen'_ part, Cole simply reached over and turned off the printer.

"Mel? Please talk to me."

The War Room was suddenly too quiet. The irony of the role reversal, with _Cole _now being the one asking _her_ to talk, didn't escape her. And she didn't imagine that _he'd_ be willing to let _her_ off the hook any more readily than _she _had been willing to let _him_ off. And he was much too close, overwhelmingly close. Leaving would be difficult: she'd have to brush right by him just to get to the door. Mel edged toward the back of the room, before he might get any ideas about stroking her throat, knowing she'd likely lose it if he did.

"It's been a rather ... emotional few days for me, Cole. A lot of, um, unexpected things just seemed to come up." She forced a smile, more to hold back the again-threatening tears than anything else. "You know how it is." _Please! Let it go at that!_

Cole raised a questioning brow but said nothing, waiting for her to continue.

Mel knew she couldn't possibly outwait him. Cole could likely give Job lessons in patience. _"... the things you leave unsaid will haunt you far longer than any of the things you do say, even beyond your grave..." (No offense, Grandmother. I know you mean well, but please be quiet)._ Despite her best efforts, a single tear was leaking it's way out. The floodgates weren't far behind. "It's ... it's really got nothing to do with anything. Just a, um, female type thing, you know?"

Still, he waited. With rising dismay, Mel realized that Cole wasn't buying it. He wasn't anywhere near as naive as he sometimes seemed. She swiped away the single tear as she tried to angle for the door. Another tear was following close behind.

"Not talking about it doesn't seem to be helping, Mel," Cole quietly pointed out, casually settling himself to lean against the edge of one of his work tables with his arms crossed and his long legs stretched out in front of him.

"Yeah, well, um ... Not every problem has a solution, Cole." _Damn! He's a Tracker, a highly skilled professional hunter – And he just did that deliberately to cut me off and corner me!_

"What problem is this, Mel?"

__

Cornered! Cole had cornered her! He'd left her no place to go, no way to easily get around him! No way to get away from him! Is this how his quarry felt when they found the Tracker in front of them? She drew in a deep breath, attempting to get a hold of herself. "It's just " She swallowed hard. "Well ... more and more often lately I feel as if the Sword of Damocles is poised above my life ... and the damn thing might drop down at any moment and chop off my head." 

"You're worried about a _sword_ chopping off your head? _What _sword? I don't understand."

"The Sword of Damocles. It's a literary reference from ancient Greek mythology. It's symbolic of, um ... impending danger, extreme peril."

Symbolism. Cole nodded his understanding. "And what are you afraid of, Mel?"

"Oh, just the usual, I guess ..." She tried to be breezy. "Death, taxes, cockroaches, George W. Bush, _... (black widow spiders),_ alien fugitives ..." Breezy wasn't working. The tears were starting to come steady now and she couldn't stop them. "And ... and no matter how many of them you Collect, there are always more ... always will _be_ more and ..." She bit her lower lip to halt her babbling.

"I know it sometimes may seem that way, Mel, but ..." Cole began reasonably, but Mel shook her head and held up her hand. Cole went silent, again patiently waiting for her to continue. 

__

"... the things you leave unsaid will haunt you ..." (Grandmother!!!). Mel had to turn away and close her eyes, too frightened to face him, only knowing that the next words she said could very well be the most important words of her life. "But what about _us,_ Cole?" she whispered, her back to him.

The five words hung in the air between them, then the rest followed in an unrestrained torrent. _"Is_ there an us? Will there ever _be_ an us beyond us just _wanting_ an us? How long do _we_ remain on hold? When do we get _our_ chance to live? ... Or don't you want that? Please, Cole! You have to tell me! I can't keep going the way things are anymore." _(Happy now, Grandmother?). _

Cole then knew exactly what had changed about Mel's manner: her acceptance of the uneasy, artificial balance of friends/lovers he'd insisted upon the two of them maintaining since the Marital Bliss Seminar had ended. He tried to formulate an answer, but no words came out. He cleared his throat. His tongue felt strange, much as it had when he first took human form, as if it were suddenly much too big for the confines of his mouth and getting in the way of his teeth. He cleared his throat a second time and managed to choke out: "I want there to be an us', Mel. I have for a long time now."

Through her tears Mel blinked in astonishment, a painful, suffocating weight unburdening her heart and leaving her dizzy, breathless and lightheaded. _He wanted her! Cole wanted her! _ "But if that's so, then why _isn't_ there an us? And _please_ don't say distraction'. It's a stupid excuse and I can't accept it."

It took Cole a few moments to begin to answer, and he had to reach for Mel, to pull her into his arms before he had the courage to do so. He kissed the top of her head and breathed in the scent of her hair as she clung to him, gratefully accepting the comfort of his arms. He shivered at the feel of her hot breath against his bare skin. "You ... you frightened me when we first met," he tried to honestly explain, verbalizing it for the first time, "Because I felt too much, and felt it all too soon. And I couldn't understand why. Or how. Or even why it was you." He traced the soft plane of her cheek with the back of his hand. "You must realize: I'd become used to not feeling much of anything at all beyond guilt, pain and anger. So much so I had almost disappeared from my world, from my friends ... Even from myself. I sometimes wondered if I would still be there when those emotions were gone, when nothing else remained to hold me together." That was a difficult admission for him to make, to finally give voice to and face. "From the start, you awakened something in me that I thought had died. I never thought that I'd find love again, never thought I _could_ love again. Or even would want to. 

"At first I tried to convince myself that I didn't care, that even though it felt so right whenever you touched me, or whenever you were near, it was an illusion, a lie. But I cared from the beginning when your compassion overcame your fears and you welcomed me, first into your car, then into your House and then into your life. I even cared enough to cry after Zin ripped out your life on only the second day I knew you But _still_ I couldn't accept it until I'd nearly lost you to Tev. That was when I couldn't deny my feelings any longer. And only when I was _able_ to care again could I finally do what I'd never been able to do before: start to heal, start to let go of my pain and mourn for my lost family. But though it was _you_ who allowed me to begin healing, night after night you'd retire alone to your bedroom, while I'd be left alone in my War Room. Then we went to the Seminar ... and I By that point it was just easier for me to keep you at the same distance we'd always had, to tell myself it was for your own good, as well as for my own. Then to tell myself that I had to concentrate, then to convince myself that I didn't need any unnecessary distractions', then to once again tell myself that it didn't really matter." 

Locked in Cole's warm embrace, Mel slid her hands around his neck, resting her forehead against his. "Is that it? Is that what you're still telling yourself? That it doesn't matter? That _you_ don't matter? Cole, there are other feelings besides grief, besides loneliness and guilt and pain. How long have you been denying yourself what life is all about: love, desire, need, passion? And is denying yourself these distractions' somehow less of a distraction' than giving yourself permission to live them? How long has it been for you?"

"Since ..." There was a catch in Cole's voice. "Almost ten years."

Pained for him, Mel had to close her eyes at that and turn her head away. Ten years is a long time to exile oneself in the depths of mourning. Cole was not only inexperienced with the deepest of human emotions and feelings, on many levels he'd become estranged from knowing how to feel anymore. While virtually empathic to the needs and feelings of others, he had deliberately blinded himself to many of his own. Mel had never thought of Cole as being repressed and inhibited before, but now she realized that he was – far more so than herself, in fact, but in a different, tighter, non-emotional way. By imprisoning himself as a Guard on Sar-Top and burying himself and his needs within the harsh rigors and demands of his work, he'd been heaping blame on and punishing himself for his self-perceived role in causing the death of his family. And by denying the two of them a relationship, he was _still _doing it. It explained a great deal about him. 

"There's only room for one love in your life at a time, Cole, only one love in your arms at a time. But it isn't disloyalty to a loved one's memory when you find there's room for more than one love in your heart, when you find you're able to love again even after crushing loss, when you find you can embrace life again. By remaining so alive it honors that memory and keeps it alive. And we should never reject love when it finds us. My Grandmother once told me that. We ... none of us ... can ever know how long our happiness may last." Mel had to look away again, remembering that it was Cole who had so selflessly helped her find closure to her relationship with Rod, thinking that that was when she had started falling in love with him. "We don't even know how long _we_ may last." She drew back, her fingertips tracing the invisible outline he'd shown her of his near-fatal gutting for emphasis. "Any moment could be the last one we ever have, Cole. Any moment at all." 

Cole had to stop her hands by capturing them in his own. Mel wasn't telling him anything that all his friends hadn't repeatedly tried to tell him over the years. Where they had failed, however, Mel was succeeding in getting through.

"Cole?" Mel interrupted his unspoken thoughts. "I don't think either of us has any way of knowing if we can have a future together, but can't we at least have a _now?"_

Sensing uncertainty, pain and an element of apprehension in his quiet stillness, Mel moved to kiss him. She reclaimed her hands and let her fingers play in the hair at the nape of his neck, her soft touch on the sensitive skin there stirring the hunger he'd been repressing for so long. She danced her tongue over his lower lip, then briefly kissed his mouth; she kissed the hollows under his cheekbones; she trailed kisses in his eyebrows, her lips and the tip of her tongue smoothing down the soft and slightly crooked hairs there. She kissed his closed eyelids, the very tip of his nose, and then she brushed his lips with her own again, taking his lower lip between hers and slowly savoring it, tenderly tracing it's contours with her tongue. Cole's mouth automatically opened slightly at that and her tongue slipped within. He couldn't stifle a groan as Mel's tongue brushed his, wasn't even aware that he _had _groaned, and her lips increased their pressure against his, encouraging him to accept her deepening kiss. He soon did, and she gently explored his mouth with her tongue. Within a few moments he hesitantly began to do the same in response, then began to grow bolder, the heat and energy she'd experienced with their first kiss beginning to come into play. 

Mel drew back enough to break the depth of the kiss, but still spoke against his lips. "I love you, too, Cole. It just took me a while to fully realize and accept it. And I want you. I want to feel you against me, deep inside me. I want to lose myself in you. I want you to lose yourself in me. I want us to disappear in each other. I _need_ this. And I think that you need it, too – maybe even more than I do. Can that be wrong?" 

Cole caressed her cheek in wonderment, searching her beloved face for the answer to a question he didn't even know how to ask. He so wanted to learn how to express his love for her in a way she could understand. Mel was right and he knew it. He wanted, he _needed_ to take that final step and taste life again, he needed to relearn how to reach out and seize it with both hands, he needed to bury himself and his ten long years of anguish deep within her cleansing, welcoming warmth. And she was offering it to him. As a gift. "No, Mel. It isn't wrong. I just ..." He gave a rueful shake of his head, thinking of the instructions in Dr Sullivan's long lost driver's manual'. It had all seemed so unnaturally forced and complicated to him. "I ... I know how much importance you humans place on the sex act and I ... I don't want you to be disappointed in me. I never want to disappoint you. I couldn't bear it." 

Mel took his hand from her cheek and one by one kissed his fingers, then pressed a single kiss into the palm, placing it over her heart as one of the simplest expressions of love she could think of. "Nothing about you has ever disappointed me, Cole, or ever could. And even Don Juan and Casanova had their first times. We all do. And we go on from there."

"I'm not a child, Mel. My first time was a very long time ago." He stared at his hand on her breast, wondering how that simple enchanting gesture could have made him feel so much and feel it so deeply. It was amazingly, intoxicatingly intimate to have the beat of her heart nestled in his palm. 

__

"Ah!" She gently teased, rubbing noses with him. "But she wasn't a primitive human, was she?"

"No, she wasn't." He had to smile at that. "But neither am I. " He raised her chin with one finger so he was able to look into her beautiful eyes. "I've wanted us to kiss again, Mel. And I've missed holding you and touching you. I've missed you touching me. The only time we've really touched lately is when you were visiting me in the mental hospital and I ... I ..." Words failed him, so he simply pulled her into his arms to demonstrate and kissed her again, deeper than before. By comparison, their earlier kisses had been sweet and warm, gently tentative, but this kiss was one of hunger. His hand tangled in her upswept hair, pulling her head back, and there was no room for anything save the strength of his arms about her and the heat from him that warmed her. Held pressed tight against him, Mel could feel his answering pressure and welcomed that heat, her lips parting, inviting him in for more, tasting his tongue as it gently and then more urgently gave up its innocence and found hers, his tongue probing her deeper still, memorizing the textures and flavors of her mouth, her teeth, her tongue, until she felt as though he was draining her like a fine liquor, leaving only the fires of molten need. 

Gasping, she pulled back. As with everything else, Cole was proving a dizzyingly fast learner.

"I like kissing you that new way, Mel," he said, stroking her throat. Having problems again with his tongue, his words were thick.

Mel shook her head to clear it and caressed his face, her fingertips tracing the strong line of his jaw and moving to his lips. "You really don't want us to stop doing this either, do you, Cole?" Her fingers stroked down his strong neck, dallied over the terrain of his broad chest, then moved down to the waistband of his sweatpants. "But you do realize that this can ... No, this _will _change everything about our relationship, don't you?"

"Yes, Mel, I do know But if you'll have me, if it's what you want, then joining with you is all I would ever want as well. And if the rest of it feels as good and as right as kissing you and holding you, then I know it's something we'll both want to do as often as we can."

Mel's arms tightened around his waist as she whispered only inches from his mouth, "Trust me on this, Cole: if you've enjoyed the introductory hugging and kissing, you're just going to _adore _the rest."

Cole smiled back at her, continuing to caress her throat. "How could I not? You've been my teacher. You've taught me almost everything I know about being human."

"Yeah, well ... I have to confess to being a little nervous about this, though. The first time with anyone is always kind of awkward anyway, but knowing this would also be your first time as a human, I mean um well, it does put additional pressure on me. I mean, you've told me how you do it on Cirron, but I can tell you right now, a Cirronian mating doesn't sound anything like a human mating, so I'm not exactly sure how you'll respond to all the physical aspects of it." 

"Physical? Is there something not right about me, Mel?" Cole asked, a niggling minor concern that he hadn't morphed human male signatures correctly suddenly resurfacing.

"Everything about you couldn't possibly be more right," Mel assured him with a sincere smile, remembering his sensational Full Monty striptease atop the Watchfire's bar in front of a horny, full-house mob of screaming, swooning women. He succeeded in putting the Watchfire squarely on the map with that stunt, and it's been in the black ever since. And he certainly seemed as functional as any fine specimen of masculinity should be. "All I meant is that human sex is a good deal more, um ... physical, more vigorous, than Cirronian sex seems to be."

"I keep myself in very good physical shape, Mel. I have to."

"Oh, I know you do. And you certainly are." Mel's eyes were now clear and sparkling, her face flushed with color, Cole noted, realizing that embarrassment had nothing to do with any of it. Mel grasped both his hands. "Come on, lover man. There's a far more comfortable place than this War Room for the human-style primitiveness I'm planning." 

"You don't need a plan," he told her as he followed along. "And you don't have to seduce me. You did a thorough job of that when you first took me in. I've been bonded to you ever since. We just haven't done anything about it." 

Mel stopped at her bedroom's doorway and turned to him, wide-eyed. "You mean ... All I ever had to do was _lead_ you in here? Even _after_ you told me you didn't want to have any distractions'?"

__

"Especially since then, Mel," he ruefully confirmed. "By that point I didn't have any willpower remaining in me at all. I relied on you having enough willpower for the both of us."

She led him the rest of the way into her bedroom and kicked the door closed, taking him over to the bed. _"Damn!_ For once I can honestly and truly say that I'm very sorry I _didn't_ let you down!" 

"So am I," Cole admitted, watching Mel's deft fingers untie the drawstring of his sweatpants. He could hardly breathe. He had wanted this very badly for a long time, wanted to know that Mel was his mate, wanted to join with her and share his body as he already shared his soul. Yet now that the reality of it was here, he felt totally unprepared. He must have read Dr Sullivan's book several dozen times, but at the moment he couldn't recall a thing about it beyond basic mechanics. He stopped Mel's hands with a tentative touch just as she got the tie undone. He hadn't felt this nervous, this unsure of himself, since he'd Tracked down his first Eternal, the 28,000-year old lifeforce known as Enocar, one of the immensely powerful free-ranging body-snatchers.

Sensing his anxiety, feeling it in the tremors of his hand, Mel reached up and tenderly caressed his face. "Cole, this isn't an obligation – and it's not supposed to be torture. You don't have to do anything you don't want to do. Not even this. _Especially_ not this."

He hugged her tightly against his chest, not wanting Mel to change her mind. "I love you, Mel " he whispered hoarsely. "And I _do_ want this. It's just ... I don't know enough to ..." 

Mel smiled up at him and returned his embrace. "You don't even have to bother thinking about it. Our bodies already know how to communicate their desires to each other. It becomes intuitive once you start, the voice of instinct spoken through the senses. All we ever have to do is listen." She kissed him on the cheek and pulled back. "Tell you what. Why don't you get completely undressed and warm up the bed while I go let my hair down and, um, get ready. Okay?"

"Completely undressed?"

"Believe me, clothes of any kind will be a distraction you _don't_ want."

"Yes, Mel. That would be good," he agreed. He needed a few moments to collect himself so he'd feel calmer. He knew that by clearing his mind there'd be less of a sense of nerve-taut anxiety. 

Back in the bathroom, Mel found herself in a strangely mixed erotic mood as she undressed: deliriously happy, yet serious; playful and eager, yet focused – and only slightly apprehensive over this new responsibility_. And so very FREE! _ Everything was going to be okay! _They were going to be okay! _ Usually she'd feel at least a _little_ self-conscious save with a lover of long standing. _But what divine madness was this?_ she asked her reflection. Now, she was feeling self-conscious over _not _feeling self-conscious at all! She loosened her hair and shook it out from all the pins of its by now Cole-damaged French twist. Then donning only her terry robe and leaving it unbelted, she made a quick detour to the kitchen to take the day's birth control pill, then headed back to Cole waiting for her in her bedroom.

The erotic mood stayed with Mel as Cole rose up on one elbow to greet her. Without any embarrassment at all, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, she simply allowed her robe to slip from her shoulders and drop to the floor as she boldly sauntered over to him, allowing him a good look.

For untold heartbeats Cole felt as though his eyes could drink her in forever. His gaze roamed from her beautiful face down the column of her slim neck to the fine line of her collarbone, further to the delicately carved ridges of her sternum nestled between the full soft roundness of her breasts. Then lower, to the flat plane of her belly and her strong, slender, smoothly-muscled thighs. Then back up to her face. His hands were starting to shake again and he felt dizzy, lightheaded, his chest very tight. "Mel ... You're more beautiful than I ... even imagined." His voice didn't even sound like his own.

She watched Cole's eyes as his gaze flickered down her body and then back up to her face. The mingled love, desire, uncertainty and awed amazement she saw there brought a flush to her cheeks. "I'm glad you approve," she said. "But you're very beautiful, too ... And I want this to be very special for you."

"Anything I ever do with you is very special," he said thickly_. Again with his stupid tongue._ "Please, Mel. I want to kiss you again. I need to touch you." He reached for her, blindly pulling her into his arms and down on top of him without even thinking about it, his mouth instinctively seeking hers. With Mel's body so yielding and unrestrained against his, her responses so eager and welcoming, this was very different from the kiss they'd shared at the Seminar or even the ones just a short while ago in his War Room, making him yearn for much more. And his imagination had fallen far short of what this would actually feel like, of what Mel would feel like, her bare skin pressed against his own, her silky hair curtained around his face and tumbling down to tickle his chest, his nostrils filling with the familiar mix of herbal shampoo and her female scent. He ran his hands over her back, following the slopes of her shoulders, the curve of her spine, gently cupping the smooth globes of her backside that fit so neatly into his hands, before moving up to delicately trace her smoothly inviting throat with the Cirronian touches of affection he was comfortable with. "Teach me, Mel," he said against her lips. "Show me where and how to please you."

Mel's eyes closed at the familiar warmth of his touch. "We'll both derive pleasure, Cole. I can promise you that. Right now it will give me great pleasure just to kiss you and touch you and feel you here beside me. My other pleasures can keep." 

"But ..."

She slienced him with two fingers on his lips. "This is all very new for you, so this time we're going to concentrate on you." She smiled lovingly down at him, surprising him by stroking the length of his throat until he couldn't help but give himself up to it and lift his chin for more. "You're not going to think about anything now," she told him. "This has nothing to do with thinking. You're going to disconnect all four tetraspheres of that overly complicated Cirronian brain of yours and completely stop thinking. You're only going to feel. Understand?"

No longer able to speak Cole mutely nodded, as always trusting Mel completely. Already he was beginning to tremble, the expectation alone so intensely pleasurable in its immediacy it was almost intolerable. Soon his head lolled back and his eyes shuttered closed as he lay himself open and submitted to the intoxicating sensations sent racing through him at her every touch. 

Mel was playing him like an instrument of sensation, coaxing rhapsodies with her nimble fingers, moist lips and velvet tongue up and down the length and breadth of him, teasing his flesh, drawing out the primal rhythms. Her hands moved down his chest, her nails rasping lightly in random patterns through the dusting of fine dark hair, across the iron-sculpted lines of his abdomen. "I've been wanting to touch you like this for so long," she murmured. Her name was all he could utter, a bare strangled whisper driven by a deep exhalation. 

Not wanting to push him too far or too fast, wanting to give him the time to savor the sensations, Mel went slow, yet the tempo of his pulse rapidly quickened beneath her lips, his uneven breathing coming ever shorter and faster. Several times she paused, concerned that he was so acutely sensitive to touch, some of his responses too intense, but each time she heeded his whimpered _"don't stop"_ plea and continued kindling him near to the point of sensory overload. One long moan after another began rumbling up from low in his chest, until he couldn't form a cohesive thought, couldn't put together a coherent sentence if his very life depended on it. Cole had no idea what Mel was doing to him and he was well beyond caring. He just never wanted her to stop, his shudders became tremors, the tremors escalating to spasms, the entire vortex of the universe centering, contracting, and revolving, poised around the heat of her mouth and the flickering of her tongue. Her own heart hammered with the tidal pull of desire washing through her. She was drowning in him, the feel of him, his amazing warmth, his spicy-musk scent, his taste, all combining to make her intensely aware of herself and her emotions, make her feel so fully free and alive that it was almost frightening. But her concern for him, over his first time, over his need to learn how to feel again, willingly made her subjugate her own desires to concentrate only on his. 

Mel slowly took him inside herself and paused for a moment, lost to the glorious feeling of Cole becoming such an intimate part of her, allowing them both to revel in each other's heat, the smooth slide of skin within skin, and the unmistakable sensation of a throbbing pulse that wasn't their own, at one and the same time within and all around. Then she began rhythmically contracting unseen muscles around him. At first his eyes flew wide open in stunned amazement, then they turned to black, wildly dilating in desire before glazing over and drifting shut. 

Cole simply forgot how to breathe. Mel's tight warmth directly above him, surrounding him, was exquisitely painful, almost agonizing, more than he could bear. He was both afraid to move and unable not to. Mel felt the building tension humming through him and began moving in gentle undulating rhythm. He instinctively surged upward, conscious only of a driving need for them to join together, to move together, to be together. He cried aloud, desperately grasping her hips, pulling her tighter onto him. Mel couldn't help but give her own cry as she felt the heat of him penetrating deep within her. 

"Mel!" Cole was breathing in great ragged, shuddering gasps. "I ... I can't... I ..."

Mel went very still. _"Shhh._ It's okay, Cole," she gently chided him. This isn't a test." She began stroking his throat again to calm and reassure him, watching the anguished struggle on his face as he tried so hard to hold back, feeling the taut muscles shivering under her hands as his eyes searched hers. 

"But you ..."

"Never mind about me. Just let go, my love." She smoothed the tension on his brow away with her fingertips. "The rest isn't important now." She traced his lips with her thumb before softly brushing them with her own, his wide eyes fixed on hers until she firmly caught his mouth and forced them to close again. Trusting her instincts, she rode him down, letting his desires surge unchecked but not uncontrolled, coaxing him to accept what his own body was beginning to incessantly demand. 

No word in any language Cole knew of came close to explaining what Mel was doing to him. No definition could possibly describe the searing sensation of blood boiling hotly through his loins demanding release, insisting upon completion. He began to quake uncontrollably as the axis of the world began to tilt, his senses whirling under a kaleidoscope of intensity, then abruptly short-circuiting in an overwhelming blast of vivid blue-hotness that propelled him beyond his body into a realm of pure rapture. The world passed from searing white to echoing black as pleasure and joy consumed him, disintegrating him beneath a thousand sensations until he was no longer aware that he even had a body, unaware that he was crying her name aloud as he clutched her tightly and emptied himself deep within her. 

Mel silenced his cries with another, deeper kiss, capturing his surrender. 

Cole came back to himself feeling reborn, with the impression of a warm Spring shower sluicing through his every cell. He didn't want to move. He wasn't sure he could move even if he wanted to. Vaguely, he was aware that he was glowing all over. 

He blinked and smiled lazily down at Mel laying alongside and half atop his length, one leg up and thrown over his thighs. She was idly curling his chest hairs around her fingers, twirling the short strands into rows of little peaks. Judging from the number of them, her slender fingers had been busy at it for at least a few minutes She smiled a cat that just ate the yellow canary' smile back at him. "Hey, Cole. You still alive?"

He had to think about that one a moment. "Either I'm not ... Or I'm more alive than I've been in a very long time." He drew her up and tightly wrapped his arms around her, tears welling in his eyes. "Thank you, my love. Thank you."

"You're more than welcome." She ran her fingers through his hair, pushing it back from his forehead. This relaxed, he looked positively boyish. "Amazing, isn't it? What someone can do for you is a whole lot different than what you can do for yourself. Good thing, too. Otherwise, none of us would ever need anyone else and the human race would've probably gone extinct a long time ago."

"Not just someone', Mel. _You._ What _you_ do for me. You're all I really need." 

Mel couldn't seem to keep her hands still, couldn't seem to get enough of touching him. Just feeling the corded muscle beneath his skin made her heart flutter. Her mouth started to wander as her hands again began to work their way down his chest and belly. He felt so good that she just couldn't keep herself still. Cole had never offered any objections to Mel touching him in any way she wanted to, and he wasn't about to start now. Submissively, he left himself open for her to do whatever she wanted.

__

"Oooo, you're positively shameless, aren't you?" Mel snickered with delight.

"Would it do me any good to resist?" he answered, the contented, unseen smile evident in his tone of voice. He kissed the top of her head, buried his face again in her fragrant hair. This uniquely human experience had been nothing like a Cirronian joining, yet for him it had been every bit as _(what was the expression? oh, yes)_ mind blowing.

"Nope. No good at all." Mel sighed as she closed her eyes, snuggling in his arms and enjoying the warmth of his breath tickling her ear, stroking his soft dark hair. It felt so right, the two of them like this. The heat of his hands caressing her radiated through her skin, and the hollow of his throat, mere inches from her mouth, tempted her to plant a kiss there. She let her hands play on his chest, enjoying the visual contrast between her creamy-pale skin to that of his darker honeyed tone as she massaged her fingers through his furry chest hair like a cat, demolishing the little peaks she'd created. Cole was such a wondrous contrast of textures that she couldn't imagine ever tiring of exploring him. As her fingers moved up to his shoulders, the chest hair gave way to bare skin as smooth and sensual as silk, yet just beneath it lay hard, unyielding muscle, leashed power that she could sense even when he was so still and relaxed. A swell of intense need filled her until she thought she would burst with her love for him. But they had time now. And her time would come. _Soon. _

"I have no resistance in me anyway. I love how your skin feels without any clothes on, Mel. And I love how your skin feels against mine." Human bodies were capable of far more than he'd ever given them credit for. The intense sensory awareness of skin was amazing, well beyond anything in his experience. Initially, he'd thought that the human preoccupation with clothing was strange for he knew of no other species that so routinely covered up so much of it's body. Experience with cold, however, had taught him that clothing at least served the function of preserving warmth. Now he saw a secondary function: a rein for rampant human sexuality to enable them to accomplish other things beside mating.

Mel was blazing a trail of tiny kisses around his neck as he talked, aiming for the hollow of his throat.

"You _bit_ me!" he cried with mock-horror, failing to sound anywhere near as furious about it as he'd intended. Improvising, he stuck out his lower lip and tried to glare at her, but his eyes were dancing with happy lights, spoiling the effect. 

__

"Awww, I'll just have to kiss it and make it _a-l-l_ better," Mel cooed, glad he remembered their private little Tiffany joke. She snuggled up and gave his throat a long enough lingering kiss that a rising and falling sighing sound began rumbling soft and low deep in his chest. Mel broke out in an amazed grin. _Wow!_ Although hardly audible, and that only when right up against him, it sounded remarkably like the purr of a well-contented cat. A _very_ large and _very_ well-contented cat. _Cirronians could purr!_ She could easily get real used to that. Then, as a matter of verifying something else she'd thought she'd noticed earlier, she teasingly pattered her fingertips down his flank and quickly obtained her verification. He was ticklish, alright. Very much so. _Oh, goody!_

Rolling around naked in her bed with the big Cirronian was a joy. But rolling around naked in her bed with him when she had him laughing so hard he was nearly helpless was a very special joy. Finally, even though she managed to stay on top of him, Cole had her arms pinned behind her back. 

"No fair! You cheated! You used hyperspeed!"

"No, I didn't," he innocently protested, using the opportunity to gently nibble his lips down her deliciously presented throat from chin to collarbone and back again, helping himself to the sweet taste of her. He was just realizing that Mel taking free rein of his body had taught him a great deal. "I was only using my natural Cirronian speed."

"But it's faster than normal human speed," she mumbled, really enjoying his nibbles.

"Yes it is, Mel," he cheerfully agreed, leisurely starting his second nibble trip down her throat.

His lips on her sensitive throat were even more intoxicating than his hands. They were igniting warm little flares tingling along her skin, encouraging her to sink into the sensation. She sighed with contentment and did just that. Who was she to argue? Clearly Cole had already learned that his mouth could do most anything his hands could, and whatever felt good done to him would feel equally good if done to her. And he seemed to be working up an appetite for a big helping of seconds, which she was all for. Jess had been right: a man who could eat with commitment' _was_ sexy. 

Before she could even blink, Mel suddenly found herself pinned, flat on her back and nose to nose with the grinning, puppy-eager Cirronian. "Now _that _time I used hyperspeed!"

She couldn't help but laugh. God, he felt so good on top of her! _And he seemed to be accessing the merits of this new position with approval as well._ "Um, Cole, I think ..."

"No, Mel," he said teasingly. "You're not going to think about anything now. As you've said, this has nothing to do with thinking. You're going to disconnect both hemispheres of that simplistic, primitive human brain of yours and completely stop thinking. You're only going to feel. Understand?"

Mel rolled her eyes. "I _hate_ it when my own words are thrown back at me," she mock-grumbled, kissing the tip of his nose for emphasis.

"But you're a very good teacher, Mel," he said reasonably. And I have to demonstrate to you that I'm capable of applying what I've learned so far. Wouldn't you agree?"

Mel affected a schoolmarm attitude "While I'll allow that you're usually a very fast learner, in this you're only a lowly student. I therefore must insist you accept any and all of my corrections and follow my guidance. Is that clear?"

"Of course. How else would I know if I've gotten the basics right and my lessons can proceed?"

She gave a wicked chuckle and threw her arms around his neck, her full lips parting in clear invitation as she looked up at this man she loved so much, her slender fingers warm and strong against his scalp, entwining in his hair and toying it into strands. "Okay, student. Whenever you feel you're ready, you may give your teacher some idea how long it's going to take you to get to Carnegie Hall."

He looked at her blankly and Mel couldn't help softly laughing at his oh-so-familiar and wonderfully endearing expression of utter confusion. _She loved it! She loved him!_ "There's only one way anybody can get to Carnegie Hall, Cole, and that's with lots and _lots_ of practice. _Lots."_

"I understand, Mel," he said, the hungry glow of desire in his eyes belying his solemn tone and telling her that he'd at least gotten the gist of the reference. "I promise to be a very diligent student and practice as much as my teacher thinks I should. Every day, if necessary. Many times a day, if necessary. All day and all night, if necessary. It won't be hard."

__

"Ahhh. Lesson number one, my dear student: it's _supposed_ to be hard." 

Not so innocent that he didn't know exactly what she meant, Cole pressed against her belly and Mel's eyes flew open wide. "Have you no faith in Cirronian physiology, Mel?" 

She chuckled again, this time a little shakily. "Um ... Seems I'm going to be learning a lot about that."

For a long moment Cole traced her lips with his thumb, allowing the visual impact of her lovely smiling face to wash over him. The love and adoration he saw reflected in her eyes humbled him for it was exactly as he'd always hoped it would be. He committed every detail to memory to save, to savor, to lose himself in. His fingertips caressed her brows, her cheeks, followed the curve of her jaw to the point of her chin, then he focused his attention on her wonderful mouth, lifting it to his. His Mel tasted so very sweet. And her body was so warm and soft against his. Everything about his Mel was soft and sweet and deliciously inviting. 

His Mel. His. 

Held close in the warm circle of Cole's strong arms, her lips melded to his, Mel felt that no time, no place, no _nothing _else existed except this endless moment they were finally sharing, the delirious feeling of Cole kissing her as no one had ever kissed her, of his hands melting into warm continuous motion as they glided over her on an unhindered, unhurried journey of exploration, drawing her into the growing heat of his body. To feel not only his hands but his entire body pulsing out the energies that had once only been given to her throat was magical. He murmured her name as she moved against him, his liquid-soft eyes glowing luminescent with love and tenderness, regarding her as if she were a rare and priceless gift, a treasure meant for him and him alone. 

Mel welcomed him with everything she was, pouring herself against him, her voice melting over him, encouraging him to take whatever he wanted, to let her give it all to him. She couldn't remember ever burning like this, not from mere lust or the need for simple release, not to give or receive pleasure, but to find something that a union of bodies alone could only partially fulfill. 

Cole needed to fill himself with every inch of every sensation of her. And he had a burning need deep in his soul to make this last as long as he could, to give her as much of himself as he could, to have them both cherish every moment of their joining as long as they possibly could. He ran his hands over her, his senses discovering her, his mouth painting her heating flesh, breathing in the heady female musk scent of her and drowning himself in her. Caressed to a state of mindless delirium, Mel was no longer a being of flesh and blood, but one of total sensation stretching out to forever and unable to hold on. 

Cole captured her hand, pressing it over his heart as he entered her, needing to bury himself as deeply into her as he could get so that the lines between them would vanish and they'd meld into one, needing her to somehow feel the depth of his emotions through the imperfect medium of the human body. She clung to him, crying and screaming his name as she dissolved, as all the world stopped, then exploded in blinding hot whiteness with a long, shuddering, undulating orgasm that seared and shattered the length and depth of her from her head to her toes and back again. 

He went very still, clinging to her, burying his face in the crook of her neck, desperately trying to bank the raging fires of need and want burning through him that were too soon building to an excruciating boil, trying to find a balance in this sea of pleasure so intense it was almost beyond endurance, trying gain some modicum of control, the struggle playing out in the vibrating tension of his body, in his harsh breath coming in short ragged pants, heating her throat. 

Words couldn't possibly convey the full intensity of what Mel was feeling, and the only other way she knew to express them to him was in the language of her body. She cupped his face in her hands to plunder his mouth with her tongue while rocking her hips and grinding them up against him, driving him so deep within her that he was reduced to whimpering down her throat and it was no longer possible for him to remain motionless. All but sobbing, Cole began thrusting again, his strokes now long, slow and deep. Mel wrapped herself around him, her arms embracing his shoulders, her legs encircling his hips, arching tight up against him completely submerged in the sensation of him. She kissed and caressed his face, his neck, his chest, his arms, back and shoulders, wherever she could reach. She couldn't seem to get close enough to him, wanting him all over her, in her, around her.

Mel became possessed by the rising heat of him, the blood set to boiling through her veins, rending her dumb, blind and deaf to everything but their hearts beating in unison, tangling the signatures of their lifeforces together. All sense of time and space disintegrated under the searing iron fire of his driving penetration, all sense of reality and logic vanished, all sense of separation denied. He was scorching her, relentlessly stoking her into a quivering caldron of liquid flame, incinerating her to raw ashes.

__

"WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN HERE!?!" The indignant bellow from across the room was like the proverbial bucket of ice water, snapping Cole's head up with a startled yelp. Beneath him, Mel let out with a strangled sobbing groan.

Vic was standing in the bedroom's doorway, his white-knuckled hand still braced on the doorknob, his jaw hanging wide open in horrified dismay, his angry, disbelieving face flushing near-purple. _"Mel!?!"_ his voice cracked into a higher register, making him sound like a querulous old woman. 

Cursing under her breath, Mel eased Cole off and sat up, yanking at the tangled quilt to cover herself, inadvertently pulling most of it off of Cole in the process. 

"Vic!" Mel finally managed with as much dignity as she could muster. "What are you doing here!?!" Cole was mumbling what sounded like some very juicy swear words of his own in what didn't much seem like Cirronian. Whatever the language, he was clearly pissed off. Remembering how he had once thrown a convenience store clerk fifteen feet across a parking lot just for stopping him when he'd shoplifted a candy bar, she quickly put a restraining hand on his arm, just in case.

"I I came over to see you, to ask if you wanted to go out for breakfast, to " Vic colored even deeper as Cole abandoned any pointless attempt at behaving with human modesty with the small bit of quilt available to him and simply sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and glaring at him as he reached for his discarded sweatpants on the floor. "I _did_ ring!" Vic hurriedly added. "I _swear_ I did! _But there was no answer!"_

"Mel, perhaps I should just " Cole began, his voice so low and tight it was nearly a growl. 

__

"No!" she snapped, throwing him an almost pleading don't you dare do a thing' look. "Just ... just stay here. This is my problem, not yours. I'll take care of it." She groped for her terry robe while trying to keep the quilt tucked under her armpits, all under Vic's embarrassed yet intense scrutiny. 

Robe finally on and securely belted, Mel gave Vic a none-too-gentle shove out of her bedroom, marching him down the hall in tense, ominous silence as Cole was left tieing the drawstring of his sweatpants. He indecisively paced around the room for a half minute as two separate instincts warred him in completely opposite directions. The voice of long experience with strong-willed Cirronian females clearly told him to just stay put exactly as ordered and allow Mel to handle this situation her way. But the older, more primitive and most immediately compelling voice was demanding he go out there and bodily escort Vic to the door, ideally kicking him down the stairwell to send him on his merry way. Inasmuch as this entire situation intimately involved him, he compromised by assuming an inconspicuous station in the hallway by the kitchen, bringing him close enough to the living room to overhear the conversation, but allowing him to remain out of sight. 

There was a strained and awkward silence between Mel and Vic that was palpable, then 

__

"Well? What have you got to say for yourself?" Vic loudly demanded, assuming the role of the injured party. _"Come on!_ Let's hear it!"

__

"Me? You're the one who came barging unannounced into my home, into my _bedroom,_ yet! It seems to me _you_ should be the one providing the explanations. And offering up groveling apologies. How _dare_ you!" 

"For God's sake, Mel! We're practically engaged, and yet I find you're screwing that that idiot savant! Under my nose, yet! How long have you been lying to me about the two of you?" 

"Not that it's any of your business, but this was our first time."

__

"DAMN! Look, okay. I understand you're nervous at the thought of our getting married. Last fling and all. So I can forgive you for it. But _he's_ got to go and go _NOW!_ I want him out of _here,_ out of our _lives_ and _GONE!_ This can't _ever ..." _

"No, Vic, it's _you_ who doesn't seem to understand. You and I are _not _practically engaged'. In fact, you and I will never _be_ engaged, so there's no reason for me to be nervous at the thought of our getting married'. I told you repeatedly: I'm _not_ going to marry you." 

"But you _promised_ you'd think about it!"

"And I _did_ think about it, Vic, even though the only reason I promised at all was to get you off my case, because you refused to take a direct no' for an answer, because that was the only answer you'd let me give you, the only one you'd accept."

There was a long silence. 

"Sweetheart?" Vic's voice had softened to the point that Cole was straining to hear. "Do you hear yourself? You're not making much sense. You're thinking with your body, not with your brain. I'll concede that the Martian in there might be a good lay – okay, maybe he's even a sensational lay – but that isn't what's important. What _is_ important is that he can't possibly offer you all that I can, he doesn't know you like I do, he will never understand ..." 

Cole edged marginally closer, restraining himself from interfering only by exercising considerable self-control as he crossed his arms, gripped his biceps and leaned back against the kitchen's doorjamb, listening intently. He hadn't known of Vic's proposal, but couldn't in any way blame him for loving Mel or wanting to marry her. He didn't harbor any feelings of anger or ill-will toward the Detective at all. His anger, he realized, was entirely directed at himself, at the depth of distraction (that horrible word again!) he'd permitted himself. If anything, he'd badly underestimated how very much of a distraction human intimacy can be. Mel had so fully consumed his senses that he'd never heard the doorbell ring, never even heard or sensed Vic's approach at all. 

And this time it had _only_ been Vic, a mere human who had completely surprised him without needing any stealth at all. The next time it could well be one or more of the felons closing in on them with lethal intent. And _they _knew how to be very stealthy. 

Sorrow, pain and regret threatened to overwhelm him as the newly-born promise of a renewed life abruptly died within him. Cole's mind shifted from a brief burst of denial into a state of deep, leaden numbness that cauterized the knowledge that his heart had just been gouged from his chest. For he and Mel, there could never be a next time.

"Please, Vic," Mel's voice was becoming tense. "I don't need your brand of protective nurturing. I need respect. I need to be listened to. I need to know that I'm valued for who and what I am. I need to feel that I'm a part of something, that I well and truly belong. Those are the very things you've always seemed to have trouble providing on my terms. Now, please! Give me back my spare keys and just leave." 

"Oh, Mel, sweetheart, come on," Vic wheedled. "You're exaggerating. You know there's always been something very special between the two of us " 

"Yes there is, Vic. Very special. _Friendship._ You and I are not meant for the long haul as anything other than dear friends. As a couple we've only ever worked in spurts. Now, leave. Please."

"Mel, if you would just ..."

__

"Dammit! Why won't you ever really _listen_ to me? Let go of me " 

Cole finally stepped into the living room. "Vic! You're going to have to let her go. You can't force Mel's attentions to be as you wish them to be. And you well know it."

__

"You!" Vic spun around to fully face Cole, his hands balling into fists.

Cole held up his own hands in a gesture of appeasement. "No, Vic," he said mildly. "You really don't want to fight me. And I certainly will not fight you." For a long moment the two men faced each other across the silence of the living room, Vic struggling with acceptance, Cole waiting patiently for what must be, both drowning in their own internal flood of grief. 

Mel looked from one to the other, then stared hard at Cole, reading the despair written in the resignation of his posture, in the unshed pain of hopeless longing swimming in his eyes. She began to tremble as the cold, implacable reality of it settled over her. What a cruel and terrible joke life can be. To know the desire, to experience the love, but to only be permitted to share it for one very brief moment in time. She knew with certainty that the past few hours were all she and Cole would ever have together. And she knew that Vic had shown both of them why it had to be that way.

"Sweetheart, I'm so sorry," Vic was brokenly sobbing. "I love you. But what a selfish, inconsiderate, possessive _jerk_ I've been."

Mel wrapped her arms around him, holding him in a close embrace, soothing him, her own tears spilling in abundance for the three of them. "Shhh! It's okay, Vic. I understand ... And love you, too. You must know that."

Cole caught Mel's eyes a final time and gave her a faint smile, then headed for his War Room, leaving Mel and Vic alone to mend the strained bonds of their friendship.


End file.
